A Song in the Daylight (2009)

by Paullina Simons

  “Hmm. What about if we poured the tequila straight into the beer? Would that be interesting?”

  “Fascinating,” said Jared.

  And they did. And it was.

  Ezra kept trying to open his mouth and tell Jared something. He was having trouble getting the words out.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything, Ezra,” said Jared. “Nothing I don’t already know.”

  “You know,” began Ezra, “I loved her.” He paused. “Once.”

  Jared nodded. “Nothin’ I don’t already know.”

  “Did you? You didn’t! About what?”

  “Oh, I knew. About you and Larissa.”

  “No!”

  “Of course.”

  “Since when did you know?”

  “Since college.”

  Ezra stammered. “It can’t be. Since then? No. But you said nothing!”

  “What was there to say?”

  “Some word perhaps…”

  “What for?”

  This stumped Ezra.

  “Honestly, what for?” Jared repeated. “What was, was. It was a long time ago, it was before she and I got together. It was over and done with. It was fine.”

  “But how could you never have said anything?”

  “It amused me. Had I felt threatened, I would’ve said something. But, see, I thought I knew her. I felt safe with her. And we were all friends. I thought you knowing that I knew might make you more awkward with me.”

  “I had asked Larissa if she ever told you and she said no.”

  Jared nodded. “That was true. She never told me. Now that I think about it, I find that peculiar, don’t you? Like another sign I missed. She knew how to keep secrets. But I knew anyway, Ezra. When you looked at her, it was so obvious. You used to look at her with a longing that I used to look at her with. Not easy to hide.”

  “Wow, dude.”

  “It’s okay. It’s all good.”

  “We were such good friends.”

  “Yes. I loved that. The four of us were always close.”

  “I didn’t know, Jared. Believe me. If I knew I would’ve said something.”

  Now it was Jared’s turn to pause. “Would you?” he said. “Like what? And to who? To me? To her?”

  “She was always happy with you. You were the one she was meant to be with.” Ezra looked into his beer glass. “For a while this bummed me out, years ago. That you were the one she was meant to be with, not me.”

  “Believe me when I say this, man, but how I wish to God I weren’t the one she was meant to be with.”

  They both sort of laughed, except Ezra less, and this amused an intoxicated Jared. Was Ezra thinking that perhaps Larissa might have stayed had she chosen differently back in college? “Funny, how our preconceptions become misconceptions,” Jared said. “Had you seen that I wasn’t the one she was meant to be with, you might’ve seen the other thing in her.”

  “The thing we all missed?”

  “Yes.” Jared looked away to the blue light shining down on the bright glass bottles of top-shelf liquor. Her mother hadn’t missed it. Which is why Larissa wanted nothing to do with her. “You missed it because you looked at an illusion. You saw the crystal glass from the outside. How were you to know that inside the flute was empty?”

  They both agreed there was no way to know. “I can’t believe you knew about me and her.”

  “You couldn’t hide yourself, Ezra. Not like she could hide herself. You loved her back then. It showed. Everybody knew.”

  Ezra was quiet. “Not everybody. Not Maggie.”

  “No.” Jared didn’t want to say that Maggie just didn’t want to look. Like he didn’t want to look. “Maggie is the greatest. I don’t need to remind you that your wife is still with you.”

  “I’m sorry, man.”

  It seemed like Ezra was crying dried-up tears, dry-heaving and moist of face, but it was hard to know because Jared couldn’t look at him. “Me, too, Ez. Hey, did you catch the Queen retrospective on MTV last weekend? It was quite good, but the whole two hours was worth a split second of Freddie Mercury’s face at one point toward the end. He was singing in his last ever video performance, and the song was ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives.’ And in this video, Mercury is like Skeletor. He can barely move, and when he does it’s in slow motion. He is heavily made up to disguise the unmistakable fact that he is this close to Death—and knows it. And so like this, gaunt, eaten away by illness, he stands, barely moving, and sings. ‘You can’t turn back the tide,’ and then he stares into the camera and whispers, ‘Ain’t that a shame.’ And in his eyes you see his life, and his regret and his imminent death, and how much he wishes he had lived differently then so he could live a little longer now. If you blink, the moment is gone—like many things, but that blink is how I feel. I wish I could go back to the days before, when I thought I was happy. Just one roller-coaster ride, one more week in that walk-up in Hoboken, us broke, diluting milk, and yet…”

  “Dude, it wasn’t one thing,” said Ezra. “There’s no one moment you can go back to and say, if only I did this differently. Besides, you’re looking at it all wrong.” Ezra turned to Jared on the bar stool, his liquid eyes animated. “It wasn’t up to you! Her leaving was not your choice and it’s the one thing you can’t undo, you can’t fix. But you can now look at your life in two ways. You can look at all that had been taken away from you—and that’s what you have been doing. Or you can look at the great many things you still have.”

  “Ezra,” said Jared. “Haven’t you noticed? I vacillate wildly between both.”

  “I know, man,” Ezra said, subsiding, putting his hands on Jared’s shoulders. “Me, too.”

  Another hour went by. Or two. Was it closing time? What if Maria was asleep? A cab was in order. They’d never been out that late. They had moved to a corner of the bar, to a table.

  “I picked her, Ez,” Jared said. “I was in love with another girl before her, a real wild child, but I never slept at night. Yvonne was not the girl to give anyone peace.”

  “What about when she wasn’t with you?”

  “Especially,” Jared replied, “when she wasn’t with me.”

  “Ah.”

  “Larissa, on the other hand, had everything except the thing that made me nuts inside, and I mean that in a good way. She was goofy, she was funny, she had interests, she was smart. She was beautiful.”

  “Yes,” said Ezra, and the way he said it, Jared didn’t know if he was saying yes to the last thing or to everything.

  “But the main thing was, I looked at her and saw a life with her. I thought we could build something together that would stand.”

  “And you did.”

  Jared was contemplating.

  “You wish you’d stuck it out with wild Yvonne?” said Ezra. “I knew Yvonne. She walked around campus with no underwear, and when she thought someone behind her might not know it, she would pitch forward to pickup something off the sidewalk. Just so that they would know it.”

  Jared nudged Ezra. “This is spoken from experience?”

  “The bitterest kind.”

  Jared laughed drunkenly. “Wasn’t she swell? In hindsight, she seems so charming and adorable.”

  Ezra laughed. “Does it make you feel better to think about her?”

  “I dunno. Wonder what she’s doing now.”

  “She’s a flight attendant.”

  Jared stared at Ezra in surprise. “You speak from experience?”

  Ezra nodded solemnly. “The bitterest kind.”

  Now Jared gaped. “Don’t tell me she’s kept her wanton ways.”

  “Okay, I won’t tell you.”

  “God, Ezra! That could’ve been my wife! And Larissa could’ve been yours.”

  “I’m not sure,” confessed a tearful Ezra, falling down, falling down, “that I would say no to that, even knowing what I know now.”

  I had once hoped it was me you saw when you were alone in the daylight, Jared had wanted to say to Lari
ssa, but it was too late.

  It wasn’t him she saw. The rest was moot.

  It all went up like a dream, and suddenly living became like sleeping. Your heart is raw, and somewhere inside it still hurts a little bit, but all the details have gone, all the memories banished in the plural from the singular of your soul, and sometimes you still reach, reach for her heart, your fingers stretch to remember what you dreamed about, the thing that’s forever gone. But you can’t. After grasping at the nebulous half-images, you rise, and you dress, and you go about your present day.

  At the moment life no longer feels like ether. And it doesn’t feel like a dream either. Jared’s feet are firmly planted on the ground. His eyes are open. He is realistic, pragmatic, practical. He knows he is blessed with much. And if a part of him remains closed, that’s the price he pays for drinking his half-empty cup with grace.

  Sometimes he wishes he could keep the memory of her alive, remember her better. Sometimes he wishes he hadn’t thrown out all her photos, in an act of Neanderthal fury, burned and cut and excised all photos of her from their life. Sometimes he wishes he had saved at least the wedding photo. She was a different person then. He was a different person then.

  Sometimes he wishes he could feel that clarifying hate again—for anything. He has mellowed. Nothing fazes Jared nowadays. Nothing can.

  He remembers often Kavanagh’s words to him, the ones that have stood the test of the merciless river called Time. She cannot give you what she doesn’t have.

  That had been almost comforting. Almost as if the carefully wrought destruction was out of Larissa’s hands. Almost as if it was nothing more than a casual demolition of the things he believed to be true.

  Except…

  When Jared went through Larissa’s things, he found a poem she had written, buried thoughtfully underneath the sheath of careless papers, a poem undated, untyped, written in her long and flowing, precise and elegant hand, titled “Runaway Child.”

  I’m a runaway child.

  Jump for joy. Full moon. Summertime. Falling into snow.

  Our song, our wedding song.

  Marry me you sang

  champagne on your lips.

  Bon Voyage, a calm day.

  It’s traveling day.

  The shooting stars have popped the air

  out of my hot balloon, and I floated, hair down.

  Heart up.

  Because it was Friday and on Fridays I loved you

  I ironed your shirts and folded your troubadour ties.

  Earthbound,

  I went for a walk, left hot chocolate on the stove,

  Papers neatly pulled away, put away,

  Everything

  Very neatly

  Very very neatly

  Put away.

  Maybe someday

  One day

  Down the years some Sunday

  You might think of me

  Too as neatly put away

  As if I never existed

  As if I were just one more thing in your life

  That had come

  and gone.

  Memories like flowers.

  Love like lime blossoms.

  PART IV

  MISS SILVER CITY

  What fresh hell is this?

  Dorothy Parker

  Chapter One

  1

  The Walker

  Larissa dreamed she was dreaming, lying on her back staring at the ceiling and sash windows with white transparent curtains, hearing the subzero freezer humming downstairs, the pattering noise of the shower through the partly open door, and when she opened her eyes, she found herself under the cream yellow quilt with golden petunias, goose down and starched white sheets and four pillows under her head. She felt her well-washed silken sheets under her palms and jumped out of bed, seeing the bookshelves, not yet emptied of stories, and her dresser by the window that had a view of green sloping golfing hills and downstairs a boy’s voice instigating an eager dog to bark. “Speak, Riot, speak!” And she did. Larissa, still in her silk nightgown, ran downstairs, and found the three children around the granite island with Emily serving cold cereal in plastic bowls. “Plastic bowls for easy clean-up, Mommy,” she said, smiling a bright new morning. “So you won’t have as much to do when we leave for school.”

  Larissa felt profound relief, like a torrent pouring down from her heart to her numb arms hanging by her sides. Thank you, God, she mouthed, standing barefoot in her kitchen, her stomach falling as though she had been thrown from a plane, falling and falling, staring at them, extending her fingers to reach for Michelangelo’s curly head. Thank you.

  She lay in a small hard bed, with gray sheets so stiff and new they abraded her on her back and her bare thighs. The crooked blinds were partly open. The room was dark because the windows faced west and it was morning, and wintertime. No, that was wrong, it was summertime, it was July.

  Everything was askew. Was it even morning? Or was it evening? Was the third day the seventh? Because wasn’t she supposed to rest on the seventh day, which was now a Tuesday? Was black white and white black? Were tears joy or joy tears? Was lack of money really wealth, was a surfeit of love really a dearth of it? Or was there a dearth of love?

  She didn’t know. And before she got up, she studied the ceiling, granite gray and cracking, like the walls, like the curtains, like the sheets. Who thought it was a good idea to paint everything gray?

  Larissa. She was the one who had painted it. Kai wanted a manly color that wasn’t blue. So she picked gray. Was the whole cottage like this? What a travesty. Crawling out of bed, she walked naked past the window, indifferently glancing outside to the blue lake, spilled out in an expansive ink stain, and beyond it the foggy Alpine hills and rolling plains asymmetrically arranged for maximum beauty. Except it was July, which was January. Nothing was beautiful in January. It was just waiting for beautiful to begin. It was cold in the house—to save money they turned off the heat at night. As she walked to the radiator to twist the hissing knob open, she recalled herself on Burns Street in Hoboken, bending the same way, but eighteen years younger and two cold, squalling children fuller. Michelangelo wasn’t even a curly thought back then. They didn’t know how they would pay next month’s rent. Later they had joked that if they had had him, they might have sold him.

  When Kai and Larissa first got to Jindabyne, they felt lucky because they found this place right away, on the peak of a hill overlooking the silver lake, in a cul-de-sac in solitude, three hundred feet above sea level, at the very tip of a dead-end street named Rainbow Drive. Even the name of the street was optimistic. Behind the ash-colored greening eucalyptus stood a little old bungalow; the weatherboard romance of it attracted them. So secluded! Up on a hill! Private. Tiny. Removed. Distant. Far away. The view was a plus, a bird’s-eye glance at the ever-changing lake, the clear of Jindabyne, bluer than blue, and when they stood on their tiptoes at the edge of their property and tilted their heads, they could see the church steeple down left in town center, four miles away by the banks of the lake. It was splendid.

  Well, yes, in the beginning it was splendid. But splendid couldn’t walk 7.2 kilometers down Jindabyne Road to town, to get work, to eat, to find a job, to keep one, to shop, to socialize. The Ducati did that, and when Kai was on it, he was in town. They had their tour bus, but Kai took the battery out in the wintertime to preserve it, so Larissa couldn’t drive the bus if she wanted to—even if she could drive it.

  In the winters she had no way of getting anywhere except on her own two feet. Which was okay with her. For the first three years it was okay with her. The four miles down the hill had been doable, manageable. But if she bought anything, carried anything, the four miles back up was a real drag, and in the fourth year, it began to get old. She started accepting rides from strangers just to get around. When Kai found out, he became upset. She promised she wouldn’t do it anymore; she knew it was dangerous.

  “You have to be safe,” he said. “We’ll get you a car.”<
br />
  “I’d settle for a Vespa,” she said.

  After a good chuckle of fond remembrance of Jaguar convertibles past, they scraped up a hundred Australian bucks for a bicycle for her. It was old, the rims weren’t balanced, and the seat was made of stone, but still Larissa didn’t complain until she was hit by a car while on it, and then she said, you know what, hitchhiking was safer. Jindabyne Road was narrow, and the lady who hit her was trying and failing to make a U-turn. She was so intent on avoiding other cars, she didn’t see Larissa pedaling uphill. So the woman hit her. Larissa swore under her breath, dusted herself off, and lightly cursing the whole way, limped home leaving the mangled bike by the side of the road. Kai saw the bike as he was returning. His panic when he ran into the house was a sight to behold; Larissa forgot all about her broken rib and broken toe. She told him she got away lucky. Heartily agreeing, he made her sympathetic tea every night for six weeks, but because she couldn’t work, he had to work double, and did, and was never home. Her rib had healed over a year ago, but Kai was still never home.

  This morning he’d gone out to find work at the ski shops. He was happy to do this, wake up each morning not knowing how he was going to make money today. They had been saving decent money through the summers, knowing from experience the winter months were meager, but last summer was particularly hard. They hadn’t made any profit; everything went on operating expenses and living costs. There was too much competition. What Kai and Larissa offered was a quality overnight tour, which attracted a hefty price tag and a particular clientele, while the competition took the daily tourists out for a quick fix down Alpine Way to Khancoban, maybe stopped for lunch at Crackenback, perhaps drove past the Strzelecki monument and was back in three hours to pick up another tour. That wasn’t Kai and Larissa’s tour.

  Sure, during winter season all the tourists and students came for the toboggans at Perisher Blue and the snowboarding at Thredbo, and the place was hopping, but also the itinerants flocked to find temporary work in Jindabyne. They worked for less money than Kai could accept. There were more people than jobs. Kai became like a migrant worker himself, renting skis and sleds, clothing equipment, selling coffee and cigarettes, pumping gas, and then scuffling for more work after he was let go for a man willing to work for half of Kai’s salary. This winter was more meager than usual. Perhaps there was an economic downturn somewhere. It was like that late-night joke: he couldn’t get a job at a ski resort in the winter.