The View from Here

by Deborah McKinlay

  That day, traveling these markers in reverse, Jessica said, “This is my favorite part,” as we drove past the trash dump.

  I twisted to smile at her. “Why?”

  “Because of that boy.” She inclined her head toward a boy, about Howie’s age, sitting on the front doorstep of a little house nearby. Next to him pink blooms tumbled from a rusty paint can. “He’s always there,” Jessica said. “He waves.”

  She waved to the boy and the boy waved back. But then a small bicker flared, the twins versus Howie, about why the rock was called Jailhouse. Taking advantage of their distraction Mason removed one hand from the steering wheel and laid it on mine. Between us the puncture-repair kit, a loaf of market bread, and two newspapers slid on the smooth leather seat. It was lovely, the simplicity of it.

  “I had a dream,” Mason said, quietly, the children’s prattle as background.

  Something in his tone made me look at him, but his face, turned to the road, gave nothing particular away.

  “Four black birds were carrying me away.” He did flick his eyes then, quickly in my direction. “What do you make of that?”

  Behind us the children, the girls anyway, had started singing “Jailhouse Rock.” Ned had taught it to them. I turned toward Mason, who was intent on driving again, and I felt sure, seeing the curious set of his mouth profiled against the bright side window, that this wasn’t a casual inquiry. That he was genuinely in search of interpretation. I suspected that he had already come to some conclusion of his own and that my answer would be tested against it.

  “I guess it has to do with freedom,” I proffered. “Flying away, it suggests some kind of release, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered softly.

  “Roooy,” the children cried, roaring in unison behind us.

  “It made me think of death,” Mason said.

  His hand on mine quit its caress. Roy stood only five minutes from the house. The gates were clearly visible. I had got it wrong. And there would be no chance, now, for redress. In my head an already familiar routine, of replaying the exchange over and over till it was mangled and pitiful, began.

  I was still in the grip of the feeling that I had failed to please him when Sally, in the glaring outdoors, in front of everyone, slid her fingers suggestively down my lover’s arm and looped her fingers through his.

  “We might take a nap,” she said, an indelicate flush on her cheeks.

  I was appalled. The lunch table was barely cleared. Patsy stared at her, then lifted her hand and, with an exact, faintly mocking imitation of Sally, ran it down her husband’s arm. “So might we,” she said.

  Richard reddened, but stood with her. She led him off.

  “Lambs to the slaughter,” Bee Bee remarked, not quite under her breath.

  I watched mutely as Mason’s back disappeared after Sally’s. On the way to their bedroom. I remembered seeing that bedroom once, in another life, when the children had taken me on a tour of the house the day after my arrival. Jenny had pushed the door open, exposing a large bed with a fluttering muslin canopy.

  “And this is where Mommy and Daddy sleep,” she’d announced.

  It had meant nothing to me then. I remember Christina was in the room, busy looping something pale and expensive and feminine-looking onto a padded hanger. She had shooed us off. As the door was closing I had seen her hold the hanger up and brush her hand lovingly over the front of the garment. It was a nightdress. I thought of that nightdress now. Its thin straps. I felt sick. A little dizzy, and sick.

  “Did that girl of ours ever come back from the beach?” Ned asked sleepily.

  Bee Bee, sitting, looking at me as she reached for a cigarette, answered, “Guess not.”

  “Lack of discipline,” Ned said, settling behind the close straw weave of a hat with a tan ribbon. “I blame the parents.”

  Bee Bee laughed and I offered, quickly, in a voice that I didn’t recognize, to walk down to the beach to check on Paige and Lesley. They had taken to spending whole days down there, a gaudy tangle of towels, and magazines, and bottles of Coke in their rucksacks. I left before Bee Bee or Ned could reply, desperate to get myself as far as possible from the house.

  The beach path curved downward. It wasn’t impossibly steep, but we had learned to watch our footing on the way down. Patches of dry dirt would give way under heels. I walked carefully, and my tennis shoes didn’t make any noise in the dust as I approached the lower stretch where the view opened up. I saw Paige and Lesley before I heard them, but it was clear they were talking, sitting on their towels, arms around their knees, backs to me.

  “I think he likes me quite a lot really,” Paige’s voice was saying as I approached.

  “He is married, though, Paige,” Lesley answered.

  “Oh,” Paige said with a shrug, “married isn’t anything. Married men screw other people all the time.”

  Lesley spun her head to Paige, then, as if not wanting to betray any shock, relaxed back again, eyes to the sea.

  “Yeah, I know,” she said, casually. “My father screwed somebody else. So did my last stepfather.”

  There was a pause before Paige replied, “Dad screwed someone too.”

  I stopped, just above them, not breathing.

  “Who?” Lesley asked. “Christina?”

  “Nooo. Of course not.”

  “Well”—Lesley’s tone was wounded—“my stepdad, before Ned, screwed Julia who looked after me.” She added, as confirmation, “Mom threw them both out.”

  Paige was silent for a second. “I dunno who it was. But I heard them fighting about it.”

  “Oh,” Lesley said. “I don’t think Ned will.”

  “No.” Paige shook her head. “Ned won’t. He’s too old.”

  I walked back up the hill a little way and mustered my voice to call out to them.

  Richard came down to dinner with a smile so bright that you could have cooked on it. Ned made some comment to that effect, but Richard, unembarrassed, continued to beam, handing a glass tenderly to Patsy. Her returned expression, I noticed, was distinctly frailer.

  Sally, arriving soon afterward, acompanied by her husband, beamed too and then announced, as if she were drawing a raffle, that she and Mason had decided it would be great fun to have a moonlight picnic on the beach.

  “Wouldn’t that be cute?” she said, the word, in her mouth, not only inappropriate, but somehow crude. “Wouldn’t that be fun?” she pressed, looking at me.

  • • •

  It was during the lazy part of Sunday on that weekend when everyone visited—the part when people are avoiding thinking about packing cars, when someone is about to suggest some last, stalling repast, inevitably unnecessary given the amount that everybody has already eaten and drunk—that I announced my intention to throw a party. They were all dozing and reading and doing the things that people do when they only have half an hour and want to make it seem like forever.

  Sonia looked at me, faintly comical in her half-moon glasses. “Hear hear,” she said.

  “A goodbye party,” I added.

  Chloe burst into tears. Ed, I was pleased to see, moved immediately to her side and placed a reassuring hand on her arm. I was sorry then, but I had given the toboggan a push, and it was a long steep slope.

  I reached out to Chloe and raised her dear chin. “I don’t mean it in a maudlin way, darling. I just want to know that I’ll have all the people I love around me at least one more time in an atmosphere like this. A happy atmosphere.”

  Chloe calmed a little, and Sonia, bless her, said, “If it’s a party you want, hon, it’s a party you’ll get.”

  “Not for a while, though,” I answered.

  Everyone was pleased at this. The tension broke.

  “Not for a bleeding age,” Dan said, putting his arm around Catherine, who looked as if she might cry too, and I thought how unfair it is, that aspect of this experience, that you have to watch people who you care about suffer. Even if I deserve to hur
t like this, they do not.

  The party was, of course, forgotten in the weeks that followed. There was our anniversary, and then a few days of poor health, and then another stay at Aldenbrook. When I got back, it was November. The sky was slate. My health rallied. We all readjusted again, let our breath out. It wouldn’t be yet. Not just yet. But I knew that it was coming, that death was waiting for me quietly and steadily, in a way that I had not known it before.

  The thing is that, much as I loathe my hospital stays, loathe the squat brick buildings and the sticky asphalt in the car park, loathe the scraggy half-dead plants and the constant, permeating smell of canned soup, there is, from time to time, in that detached unreal atmosphere, a sense almost of relief, a sense that things are in someone else’s hands. I never have that feeling at home, not completely. And so it isn’t such a surprise that it was while I was at Aldenbrook that I came to truly accept the fact of my imminent death.

  Naturally I had thought about it, talked about it too, to Phillip, to Chloe even, though she is distressed more by such allusions, but still the absoluteness of the thing hadn’t been clear. It had been forming, not in a cleanly progressive sort of way, but with differing levels of violence, little eruptions, until at last there it was, complete and unconquerable, a mountain with me in its shadow. I knew that I was going to die, and although I do not believe as some people do that life hands out justice in fair measure, that suffering is related to one’s past sins, it did seem logical, understandable that I should not live a long life.

  I had been home for almost a week and had just eaten lunch with Phillip in the kitchen, Joan’s fish pie and green beans. Our plates were cleared but we were still sitting opposite each other, Phillip finishing the glass of wine he’d poured to go with his pie. It was warm in the kitchen, warmer than anywhere else in the house, and a gentle voice, my voice, said, “I want Josee to come to my party.”

  Phillip looked very shocked, but he did not speak. After a while he drained the last of the wine and asked simply, “Are you sure?”

  I was relieved, relieved that he was not going to skate away, skim the issue or lie about it.

  “I think so,” I said, “although it is probably fair to assume that I am not at all sure about a lot of things just now. But I have thought about this, and I know that I want to see her and speak to her. And I want to do it at a time when I feel…supported. In control, I suppose. I want to feel that I am on my own ground.”

  Phillip nodded, very slowly. I felt that he understood my point of view even if he didn’t know how to come to terms with it. He got up and walked across the kitchen with his empty glass in his hand. He rinsed it in the sink, and then he turned and leaned against the cupboard where I keep the dishwashing liquid and the furniture polish with his arms crossed over his chest.

  “How long have you known?” he asked.

  “A long time,” I said.

  His expression was stricken. For a moment all the strain of the past year threatened to spill from him, but he staunched it, one hand rising and cupping his mouth and chin for a second. Then he left the room.

  • • •

  The thing that was striking about the moonlight picnic was the precision with which it had been planned. At the beach a low bonfire already burned, sending stripes of light bouncing off the sea. There were rugs spread on the pink sand, and baskets of cold meat and salads, and peach pies, and bottles of chilled wine. We arrived to all this and more. We could hear over the noise of squealing children, delighted to the extreme by the proximity of the fire, music.

  There were musicians, cloistered in the shadows beyond the base of the dirt cliff path. I watched as Sally, barefoot, pulled her husband to dance. I sat a good way back from the revealing flare of the firelight, and took a glass gratefully from someone and drank, wanting to be dulled against the events and pace of a day that I could no longer keep up with.

  I kept drinking until I was tipsy and my legs, dancing hopelessly later with Richard, felt numb.

  “Sorry, Frankie,” he said, goofily cheerful, standing on my foot.

  I nodded, attempting to smile forgiveness. The music wasn’t really dancing music anyway. Guitars playing marshmallow love songs. None of us would have danced at all if Sally hadn’t started it, I thought. I gripped Richard’s hand too tightly in mine, worried suddenly about the possibility of being knocked over by his heavy shuffle. In my head Paige’s words, Daddy screwed someone else, continued to repeat.

  I had not considered the possibility that Mason might have had other affairs. At twenty-two I’d had so little experience of marriage. My parents and their friends were my models for it. Of course I realized that married people could be unfaithful, but those that were, it seemed to me then, separated and got divorced. The kind of marriage that accepts infidelities, adds them, like so many bricks, to the fortress that shields the pair within, was alien to me. But then, when the music stopped, and the sound of the sea interceded, and Richard stood back and grinned, it struck me suddenly that if Mason had had other affairs—Paige was just a child after all, and prone to showing off—but if he had, wasn’t that just another indication that his marriage was unhappy? I wanted that night, more than any other night, to believe wholeheartedly that his marriage was unhappy.

  The children were heavily asleep by the time we got back, draped over shoulders like so many sandy rag dolls. At the house Mason and I carried the twins to their room. They woke when he switched on the light and they stared at us blearily. We undressed them and slid them into their beds, dragging the sheets up to their chins.

  “We didn’t brush our teeth,” Jessica said, croakily, over hers.

  “If they fall out in the night, I’ll buy you some new ones,” Mason whispered.

  Jessica, drifting again already, giggled softly into her pillow.

  In the hallway, he turned to me and said, without preamble, “It’s married people’s stuff, not like us.”

  I stared, dumb from drink and tiredness, exhausted by the spiking effort of loving him, the impossibility of the circumstances. Fighting the realization that I had let my whole life, in that pastless, futureless, rose-tinted bell jar, become him. A man I hardly knew, someone else’s husband, who was putting his hands on my shoulders now and talking to me about spending the afternoon in bed with his wife.

  “Not like us,” he repeated.

  I nodded slowly.

  “We’ll get away for a bit tomorrow,” he promised.

  Sometimes there’s no going back, and anyway, what did I have to go back to? The next day in my apartment, that had, shut up between visits, begun to smell of us, of love, I thought, he lifted his lips from mine and said my name. Just as I had imagined he would all through Maria’s lesson, all through the constant firing of her fascinated inquiry about the Severances, and the Lukes, and the Newsons, but particularly about Sally. Where did she buy her clothes? What foods did she serve most often? How many maids did she employ all together?

  I smiled now and simply kissed him back, a girl in love with a man who loved her, and I thought, as I often had, that the other lovers I had known paled next to him. Then, confident in the grip of this happy moment, I leaned into his neck and said, “Have you done this before?”

  Mason tipped my head back to look at my face, but he made no attempt to avoid the question. That was one of the things I admired about him; even at times when I didn’t particularly welcome it, he was candid with me.

  “Sally and I have had our problems,” he answered thoughtfully, his gaze moving, fixing on some distant space above my head. He raised my chin and looked at me and said, “But with you it’s special.”

  I saw myself, in the moment before he bent to kiss me again, reflected in his eyes.

  My face must still have been gleaming with love when Mason said casually to his wife, “Look. Pineapples.” He had bought them when I was with Maria. “The ingredient that will force Mr. Newson to concede on the best rum punch recipe.”

  Sally, answering with a
noncommittal hum, looked at me steadily over her sunglasses, her book, her golden knees. Next to her Bee Bee seemed to stare too. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. I was just glad that the mood of capricious flirtatiousness that had marked Sally’s behavior the day before seemed to have dimmed.

  It was Patsy who suggested we go back to La Roseleda. She felt like dancing, she said to me later, out by the pool, and reminded me what a lot of fun we’d had that first night, my first night, when we’d gone there. She smiled that gorgeous smile of hers directly at me. “Do you want to go?” she asked, as if it was somehow my decision. As if I was central to her plans.

  Since her confession to me, that morning after the row, she’d treated me like that quite often, like a special pal. Like the sort of inseparable sidekick girls have at school. Patsy was the sort of girl I’d wanted to be at school, pretty, and petulant, and popular. She jumped up and swiveled her hips a little and announced her desire to go dancing to the spread of sunbathers. Richard got up and threw one arm around her shoulders and swung his hip awkwardly to bump hers.

  “God, I hope it’s not contagious,” Bee Bee said, as the movement knocked them both off balance. The recovery was jerky.

  Richard, though, continued good-spiritedly, “Just warming up my samba, Bee Bee.” He jived toward her a little, with prematurely middle-aged knees.

  “Well, you don’t seem to be lighting any fires,” she retorted, backing up from his advance. “Still,” she went on, lowering herself into a tapestry-covered chair, “that’s not your fault, darlin’. You gotta rub two sticks together to get a spark.”

  Bee Bee laughed and so did Sally. Patsy did not.

  Richard, uncomprehending, grinned, snapped his fingers jauntily, and opened his mouth to speak, but Patsy stopped him: “Shut up.”

  Sally, still smiling, looked up from the intense business of fastening the clasp of a fat silver bracelet.

  “What’s all the hilarity in aid of?” Ned asked from the door.