“In Spanish,” I told her, “there are some words that are not…polite.” She nodded, earnest. “This is an English word like that. This book”—I lifted it—“is full of words like that.” Letty blushed, pink under the gold of her skin. “I think perhaps I’ll take this book and find you a better one.”
“Thank you, Frances,” she said, dropping her eyes.
I told this story to Patsy over lunch. I hoped she would laugh, and she did, but with no heart.
“Funny things,” she said, “words. You say them and other people say them, but half the time you mean different things.”
We were drinking beer. I sipped mine. She was fingering her bottle.
“A couple of days ago,” she said, “I told Richard that I loved him.”
I didn’t think she expected me to answer. “It meant nothing,” she continued, “not to me anyway. It was just one of those things you say sometimes before you realize it, because you’ve said them before. Habit, I guess. I don’t know. It’s all such a mess.”
I understood what she meant, but noted more the bonedeep unhappiness that weighted her words.
On the way home she hit the horn hard two hundred yards before the trash dump and revved the engine. The usual gang of children cleared the road. Then, with the coast clear, she jerked the car violently to the left. The hood missed the pole that Sally had hit by inches. On the ground, tiny shreds of glass glinted in the sunlight, remnants from that earlier encounter. I had been thrown forward, but I hadn’t hit the dash. Patsy lurched back into her seat.
“Patsy.” My heart was thumping. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t reply. She knew that I knew what she was doing.
People had come out to look. People who had been bent, scavenging on the trash heap, righted themselves, and the children were shouting. One of them called out “Locos” and shook his head.
Patsy did look a little crazy.
The boy who I thought of as Jessica’s boy was on his perch on the steps of one of the shambly houses, surrounded as usual with bright flowers. As I caught my breath he put his hand up and waved.
Patsy reversed the car sharply and took off at speed. At Jailhouse Rock she said, “She did it on purpose.” Then, with horrible deliberation, she banged her wrist against the steering wheel. After a pause, during which we both watched the weal rise red and angry on her skin, she said, “Calculating bitch,” and laughed too loudly. I began to feel concerned for her.
Sally was out by the pool with a cushion under her elbow when we returned. Her forearm lay across it like an offering. She smiled as we came around the corner.
“I assume you’ve eaten,” she said. “We’ve just finished, but Christina will fix you something if not.”
Mason, reading at Sally’s side, looked up calmly and smiled too.
Patsy stared. I feared a scene. She would come off the worse.
“We had something in town,” I said. “Thank you.”
Paige, dripping, just out of the pool, flapped a little hello. I sent one back. The other children were busy with a ball and a floating hoop. The pool water heaved and splashed; puddles glistened on the patio tiles.
“Where were you this morning?” Patsy asked Sally pointedly.
Sally adjusted her sunglasses. “Oh, I just took it into my head to walk to the beach. I don’t know why. I gather I caused a bit of a flap.”
Bee Bee, who I’d assumed was asleep, lying on a halfshaded lounger nearby, said huskily, “I wasn’t worried.”
Sally smiled.
“Neither was I,” Patsy added. “You can look after yourself, can’t you, Sally?”
“Most of the time,” Sally replied, looking at her.
Inside, helping herself to wine at the sideboard, Patsy said to me, “Don’t say anything, Frankie.”
I took the glass she held out.
“About the accident,” she said, glancing swiftly outdoors toward the others.
“All right,” I agreed. I hadn’t planned to. I thought her theory absurd.
Throughout the rest of the day and the evening Mason’s manner toward me was not cold, worse, the opposite, too friendly. At dinner he grinned and offered to fill my glass, waving the bottle cheerily, as if I were some newly introduced acquaintance at a Christmas party. So it was a surprise to wake later in bed to his weight on top of me. He made love to me with a fierce urgency that left me with rose-petal bruises. Afterward, his breath steadying, he curled against me, suddenly fetal, his head on my chest.
“I thought she was dead,” he said.
My hand settled, lifeless, near his elbow.
“In the car,” his voice came again, weak at my breast, “when she was lying there. Just for a second I thought she was dead.”
I stroked his arm once, mechanically, before he got up and left.
The next afternoon, returning from a late newspaper run, Richard appeared at the otherwise sleepy poolside in neat khakis and a white open-necked shirt. “You’ll never guess what I saw,” he said.
“What?” Jenny and Jessica asked. They were lying head-to-head near the pool wearing red plastic sunglasses.
Bee Bee, smoking nearby at one of the wooden tables, looked up, bemused. “He really expects us to guess, God love him.”
“For heaven’s sake, Richard,” Patsy said, “of course we can’t guess—”
“What did you see?” Sally encouraged, her voice interrupting Patsy’s. For a moment the two women locked eyes.
“The car,” Richard exclaimed.
Jenny and Jessica sat up and looked at each other as if this wasn’t much of an announcement.
Howie, though, playing at the poolside, perked up. “The smashed one?” he wanted to know.
“Our car?” Patsy asked, sitting sharply forward.
“It wasn’t really our car,” Paige said. She was sunbathing on her stomach with Lesley at the pool’s edge, one arm dangling in the water.
Richard seemed to sense that things were getting away from him. “Yes. Well, Sally’s car. Whatever.”
“New plates I bet,” Ned said.
“Maybe. Anyway, there was barely any damage. I did say that at the time.” Richard sat then and lay his newspaper, folded, next to Bee Bee’s ashtray. “I had a good walk around it,” he went on. “It was parked, on the square, and it looked pretty much okay. It was a shame, really, just to ditch it like that. Perfectly good car.”
“Just dented then?” Patsy’s voice had taken on an edge.
“Well, dented and, you know, headlights smashed, that sort of thing. Driveable though, clearly.”
Howie improvised a car crash with two of the toys he had been playing with.
“Smaash!” he shouted.
Ned laughed.
Patsy looked at Mason. “Perhaps we did all overreact a bit,” she said steadily, closing her eyes, wiggling to get a little more comfortable in the sun.
“Oh. And there was this.” Richard stood and walked to Sally, fishing awkwardly in his back pocket.
It was a postcard. From Skipper and Carl.
“The post office guy called out to me,” Richard said, taking his seat again.
Sally looked at the postcard, flipping it in her lap with a bland expression. Then she tossed it nonchalantly onto the table beside her. It landed against a pile of magazines, read too many times, their cover corners beginning to curl. For the rest of the day nobody looked at the postcard, or even leaned to inspect the photograph of blue-tinged dolphins on the front more closely. It was just too hard to imagine that Carl and Skipper had ever been there.
I’d had, all day, a slight hangover of unease. I thought she was dead. The words, remembered, replayed, took on a tone that unsettled me. But unsettled was something that I had become used to being. I brushed the feeling aside as Mason touched my arm, secretly saying good night.
In my room I tipped some lotion into my palm from the open bottle on the dressing table and sat and caressed my legs with it before standing to check my reflection
in the hinged mirror that sent back three of me. I fanned my hair with my fingers. Then I got into bed. To wait.
I was woken by the steady bang of the garden gate. Someone had left it off the latch. My room was nearer to it than the rooms of any of the other adults, at the corner of the house, but Howie slept directly beneath me. The noise might wake him. I looked at my clock, picking it up and turning the face to the moonlight; then I switched on the lamp. Two thirty. Not too late. Mason might still come.
I made my way through the dark house with subdued nighttime steps and quietly slipped the catch to release the glass doors. The gate banged once more, louder, echoey. A flare of wind snatched my robe, flapping it open as I negotiated my way across the tiles and through the outdoor furniture. I folded one arm, pinning the thin cotton, and reached for the looped black metal of the gate handle with the other. But the wind gusted and swelled again so that my hair flooded my eyes and the wayward gate rushed sharply in the opposite direction. I grabbed and pulled, dipping my head at the same time against a flurry of dust. In the dirt, on the untended ground just beyond the wall, something glinted silver. I crouched, letting my robe unreel with a snap behind me. It was Patsy’s lighter. The wind sent the gate crashing back toward me. I caught it, scooping up the lighter and dropping it into my pocket, and fixed the latch. Then I hurried back to my room in case Mason was waiting.
I got up twice more that night, once to refasten a shutter that had loosened in the wind and once to get a drink of water. After that I slept.
The wind did not let up. The rattle of it woke me earlier in the morning than I’d have liked. I got up and looked out. The garden furniture was lying on its side against the fence in a neat line; the umbrellas had been taken down and stowed somewhere, probably by the gardening men at dawn. The surface of the normally glassy pool was fractured. Mason was not swimming. I decided to dress anyway in the hope of breakfast with him. But downstairs the house was quiet and, with the whistle of the wind, a little ghostly. Christina was in the kitchen with another maid.
“Good morning,” they both said.
I wondered where to have breakfast. The kitchen table was laid, but I was wary of being too close to Christina by myself. It was strange that she was the only one of all those people who consistently made me feel that I did not really belong. She, with the clarity of someone used to the underbellies of grand houses, had recognized me immediately as someone unused to the surface of them. Richard came in, though, just then and said yes to the maid’s offer of eggs. So I sat and broke a thick slice of bread from the fresh round loaf in the basket and began to butter it.
“This wind’s something, isn’t it?” Richard said pleasantly. “Do you often get it like this down here?”
“From time to time,” I answered, picking up my bread and biting it. The butter tasted faintly rancid.
Much later in the morning, after everyone had come down, I gave Patsy her lighter. We were all in the big poolside room, except the children, who were racing wildly up and down the hallways. Patsy was sitting beside me in one of the boxy wicker chairs, toying with a paperback book, not really reading it. I slipped the lighter from my pocket and held it out to her silently, opening my palm flat so that she saw it lying there.
“Where’d you find it?” she asked casually.
I fixed her eyes and watched them as I said, “On the other side of the pool gate.”
“Oh,” she answered. “Thanks.” She took the lighter and dropped it into the ashtray on the low table beside her.
After lunch Ned and Mason and Richard and I walked to the front gate as a wind test. It was fierce by then, slapping our clothes to us, pasting the men’s shirts to their chests. At the tennis courts I was nearly toppled by it. My whipping hair stung my face. At the bottom of the driveway, we all had to squint against the flying eddies of desert dust.
“Which direction’s it coming from?” Richard shouted.
Ned licked his finger and held it up, frowning. “Every damn where,” he yelled.
“It’s a norther, I think.” Mason put his arm around me, supporting me.
“There’s a gent,” Ned said with a grin. The roar took his voice.
When we reached the corner of the house that rounded onto the pool, Mason gave my shoulder a squeeze before he let it go. As the glass doors were hauled open, he dropped his head and said quickly, and without looking at me, “Sorry I couldn’t make it last night.”
“Gale force,” he announced then, stepping inside.
Everyone was waiting for a report.
“Hurricane level,” Richard told Howie, who was pestering him to be allowed to see for himself. Richard picked him up and said, “Just to the tennis court, then.” But they were back quicker; something had blown into Howie’s eye.
While Howie was attended to, the rest of us sat back down. There was a forlorn feeling in the room. The twins, bored, began to drag from one adult to another, nagging, hopelessly, for something to do. We were all prisoners to the wind. The windows and shutters rattled. It was an unpleasant, nerve-wracking sound. Ned tipped his head back and howled. Howie, coming back from the bathroom with the maid who had bathed his eye, joined in, but the noise upset Hudson, so they were both shushed, and the baby was taken away.
Christina came in with a tray of iced tea. We all sipped for a while, listlessly, looking out at the closed-up garden. The pool looked cold and unfriendly.
“It feels like the end of summer,” Paige said.
• • •
To my mind, Chloe was the loveliest woman at the party, but to unbiased eyes Josee may have been, though it is strange to acknowledge that with no thud to the stomach. She looked very beautiful with her hair pulled back, almost severely, and her slim figure outlined to the knees by a sober black dress. Of course, hers was the one entrance that I was most attentively watching for, and so when she did arrive I picked her out immediately through the crush of two rooms. She was just then, for me, the only person in the house.
Phillip was caught between us, literally, halfway between where I stood and where she did, looking at me. He remained fixed for a moment, not knowing whose direction he ought to walk in. Josee solved his dilemma by heading determinedly toward me. Little knots of people parted to let her through.
Phillip followed meekly in her wake, and I thought, in those few seconds, of something that he had told me during that second conversation. The conversation that had confirmed for me his relationship with her as a fact, an actuality, and not something I had concocted, not something that I could ever dismiss, even in desperate moments, as slight or imagined. He had said, with immense if unintended cruelty, “It was that week, that week when you wouldn’t come to London with me. That week when you went to Madrid.”
That was when it had started. By which people mean that that is when they first went to bed together, don’t they? As if there were no point before that when the signposts were clear, when the intention was writ large. Had I asked him to supply me with this detail? I don’t think so. But in the owning up, it had all tumbled out. He had told me, sitting in that dayroom in his everyday clothes, in his ordinary voice, everything. More than I had wanted to know.
The week in Madrid had been organized by Sonia. She had been blue—her word, “blue”—and had asked me to come on a trip with her, a break, at the last moment. I am sure that Phillip agreed to the idea, encouraged it even, despite a plan we’d had to spend the week in London together. It had been a loose sort of a plan, with no particular highlights or distinctions, as I recall. The week in Madrid had—blueness notwithstanding—been wonderful. But Phillip had taken that from me now. Tarnished a happy memory at a time when I was particularly keen to store such things. He had also, of course, succeeded in implanting guilt. If I had been there, if I had been at his side in my wifely place, who knows?
“Hello, Frances,” Josee said.
“Hello,” I replied. I felt completely calm. As still inside as a dry ravine, granite to eternity.
Phillip, joining us, looked terrified. Clearly he had never thought that she would come. I had posted an invitation to her office. I wondered if he had even mentioned the party to her. It didn’t matter now.
People had fallen away, as they had all evening with each new arrival’s approach, and I asked Josee to follow me. I led her to the stairwell and, when we had mounted to the first floor, I turned to Phillip, still trailing, submissive and distressed, and asked him to leave us. There must have been authority in my voice because he did. He turned without catching his lover’s eye and, shoulders dipped, walked away. I wondered if Josee’s heart went out to him. Surprisingly, mine did.
Once, in the days when Chloe’s drawings were still routinely stuck to the refrigerator, when my unique knowledge of her likes and dislikes, her progress at swimming, had made me central to her day-to-day life and therefore, no matter what, to Phillip’s, I would have kept a good hold on my husband, whether I wanted him or not. I’d have fought my corner to win. But this was not then.
Since my past had begun to reveal itself to me in all its hideous vibrancy, since my acceptance that my life was over had taken the sting from all small things, my conscious brain had become aware of what the buried part had known all along—none of it was mine. Not Phillip, not Chloe, not the affection nor the social acceptance I had come to enjoy. I had no right to it. It had not been my due.
I showed Josee into a guest bedroom that we don’t use very often and closed the door behind her. When she turned to me, braced, I said, “Chloe doesn’t like it when Phillip teases her about her legs.”
Her face registered surprise. She had no doubt been readied for the wronged wife’s onslaught.
“He doesn’t realize, though, or doesn’t believe it. I don’t know, he thinks she’s not serious when she gets upset about it. But she really is sensitive about her legs. Some girl at school used to call her ‘stick insect.’ I wanted you to know that.”
“Yes,” Josee said.
“I want you to understand it.”
“I think I do.”
I thought that she did too. I don’t know why.
The View from Here Page 19