“Look,” she said, “I’m sort of tied up right now. Could you call me tomorrow at work?”
“Sure,” I said, my heart sinking. “Or you could call me.”
“Right. Talk to you tomorrow then, okay?”
Why did I hate calling the law firm so much? The only thing worse was going there, and nothing short of divine intervention could get me to do that. I hated the curiosity I imagined I heard in the receptionist’s voice—or worse, the pity. If Steve’s secretary said he wasn’t there, I imagined him standing behind her, gesturing that he was tied up, out, unavailable. I started wondering all sorts of things. In short, I was paranoid, and I felt well on my way to becoming like Eleanor Hampton. The only way I could cope with it was to avoid it altogether, and usually I did just that.
I didn’t exactly want to admit any of this to Susan. How could you tell someone who was eminently practical and apparently fearless that you were nervous about calling your husband’s office? Susan was fairly reserved on the subject of her past, but one story I had learned was that by the time her fiancé, a doctor in Connecticut, had decided to call off the wedding, the invitations had been sent and the arrangements for an elegant reception at his country club had already been made. The caterer refused to return even a portion of their payment, so Susan chartered a bus, rounded up sixty homeless people on the streets of Manhattan, and ferried them all up to Connecticut for the sit-down dinner. You really had to admire somebody who would do that.
I stood there, lost in contemplation of this elegant revenge, holding the phone in my hand. I turned around to find Megan watching me. Her hair was wrapped in a towel. “I thought you went to bed,” I told her.
She shrugged. I expected her to push past me on her way to the peanut butter and jelly or the stash of Fig Newtons that usually fueled her study sessions, but she stood her ground. She looked slightly worried.
“What?” I asked her.
She looked away. “Nothing.”
Uh-oh. “Is there something bothering you?” I waited. If you aren’t careful with teenagers, you can crush the life right out of the conversation before you even know what the conversation is about. I tried again. “Is there something you want to talk to me about?”
She shifted her feet and then finally met my eyes. “Have you talked to Dad lately?” she asked me.
It was my turn to squirm. “A few days ago,” I said. “Why?”
“Did he say anything about Jason and me?” she asked in a tentative voice. Her careful demeanor, in combination with the topic, was beginning to make me uneasy.
“Like what?”
“Like about us spending more time with him,” she said, looking away.
My heart started pounding in my chest. “He didn’t mention it, no,” I said, as calmly as I could.
“Oh.”
“What did he say to you?” I inquired.
Her eyes flicked back and forth. “Not much. He said he just wondered how we would feel about spending more time with him. He wasn’t very specific.”
“How much more time?” I tried to keep the incipient panic out of my voice. I had just assumed, and Steve had never contradicted the assumption, that the children would continue to live with me on a full-time basis. My husband’s long hours and newly liberated lifestyle seemed to make any other arrangement unthinkable.
“I don’t know, Mom. Maybe you should talk to Dad about it.”
“Well, he hasn’t seen that much of the two of you lately,” I told her. “He’s been so busy at the firm. They worked day and night taking Naturcare public.” I could hear myself babbling, but I couldn’t stop. “He probably just wants to make it up to you. It wouldn’t hurt to spend more time with him. He probably gets lonely, too. I’m sure that’s all he meant.”
“I guess you’re right.” She gave me a dubious smile. “So we won’t be moving soon, or anything like that?”
It was all I could do not to clutch my heart and fall stricken to the floor. “Of course not,” I said as firmly as I could.
“Relax, Mom. Don’t get paranoid.” She rubbed her hair with her towel and yawned. “Good night, then,” she said cheerfully and left me alone in the kitchen.
Don’t get paranoid. How could I help it? I had so much to lose. My age, my lack of earning power, and most of all my children made me exceptionally vulnerable. I wondered, as I stood in my kitchen trying to second-guess the husband who had become a stranger to me, if this was how Eleanor Hampton had felt, if this was how she had begun to believe the entire world conspired against her. Even Medea had had to start somewhere. I am not Eleanor, I told myself. It made me feel a little better.
“Susan Goldman’s office,” intoned her assistant with chilly dignity, the next morning.
“Jonathan?”
“Jonathan is on a break,” said the voice patiently. “This is Richard. How may I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to Ms. Goldman, please. Caroline James calling.”
He sniffed. “One moment, please. I’ll see if she’s in.” He managed to make it sound like a major favor.
“Jesus,” I said when she had picked up the line, “who was that, the butler?”
She laughed. “The Xerox operator. He fills in when Jonathan’s out. He has aspirations.”
I didn’t doubt it. Everybody at Eastman, Bartels wanted to be something else. The go-fers wanted to be secretaries. The secretaries wanted to be paralegals. The paralegals wanted to be lawyers. The lawyers wanted out.
“Look,” she said, “I’m sorry about last night, but I had company.”
“I hope it was amusing,” I told her. Susan had a tastefully varied social life. When I was married, we never talked much about it, but now I had an unbecoming lust for details. If I were ever going to go in for Middle-Age Dating, I wanted to scout the territory first.
A whole lot has been written on this topic, so I don’t really need to go into it here. If you’re old enough to remember that the last time you were going out with someone men were still supposed to open the doors for women (though not all of them did, even then), you’ll understand what I mean when I say that fear of dating has probably kept a lot of terminal marriages on the life support system.
Everybody has horror stories. My personal favorite happened to a friend of mine in New York. (Susan and I had a running debate on the virtues of New York versus California, but even she would admit that this could never have happened in La Jolla.) My friend was invited to a Halloween party given by her date’s family, and when he picked her up, he thoughtfully provided her with a fireman’s outfit to wear as a costume. He was wearing one, too. When they got to the party, it wasn’t a costume party at all, and there were the two of them, arrayed as firemen, amid a large group of disapproving and more conventionally clad aunts and uncles. Her date told her he had just wanted to see if he could get her to wear what he had brought. And this was a thirty-eight-year-old woman! It was definitely the sort of story to put minor marital annoyances in perspective.
The thing I really wanted to know about middle-age dating was what to do about sex. The pseudo-fireman was clearly out of the running, but what about everybody else? It was all so much more complicated than it used to be. Even if you took away the Saturday-night roulette and the blood tests and the etiquette of condoms, it was still a minefield of potential embarrassment and mistakes. How were you supposed to go from years of suppressing the desire to sleep with strangers to falling into the sack with the first thing in a suit that invited you for a chile relleno and a margarita?
And then there was the body problem. I mean, long gone was the day when everything was fixable, when you could get your flat stomach or thin thighs back just by skipping dessert for the next few days. I had to admit that Signor Eduardo had done a lot for my exterior, but under the paint job, the model was no longer deluxe. Maybe I would have to go into training, like an athlete. The thought of investing the necessary hours in the gym was depressing, and the only sport I liked—or was any good at—was sw
imming. To tell the truth, an excessive interest in fitness had always seemed a trifle unimaginative.
Freud said (or might have said) that there are no innocent questions, and Susan was certainly no dummy. “You mean, ‘did I sleep with him?’” She laughed softly. “Don’t worry, Caroline, we were very careful.”
“Great,” I said, as embarrassed as if I’d been caught snooping in her drawers. “Sorry if I sounded nosy.”
“No, just like my mother.”
Susan’s mother was a petite but overbearing widow who lived in Florida and called at least once a week to express her displeasure with her errant daughter’s rootless lifestyle. She was about as subtle as a freight train. “Susan, your mother is nosy,” I told her.
“True,” she admitted, “but at least you’re not so disapproving.”
“No, I’m envious,” I confessed. “But look, I did have a serious reason for calling. I want to know what you know about Eleanor Hampton.”
“It’s certainly topic A around here. The police called the firm almost as soon as they hoisted the body out of the water.”
“It’s so humiliating. I mean, how would you like to be exposed like that to a bunch of strangers?”
“Not much,” she said, not sounding particularly bothered. “Now you know why our mothers always warned us to wear clean slips in case we got into an accident. At least she might have put on a bikini, if she could have found one she could get into. Anyway, I really don’t know much about it. Apparently she was on some kind of sedative—Valium or Librium or Xanax or something like that—and she combined it with too much wine. They found the pills and the wine bottle right by the hot tub. She must have passed out and then slipped down into the water.”
“Is there going to be a service?”
“Oh, yes.” She sounded surprised I would ask. “This Saturday.” She paused. “I’m sure Steve will call you. Everyone at the firm will be going. Barclay is taking care of everything.”
“I’m sure he’s disfigured with grief,” I said.
“He seems to be genuinely upset, Caroline,” she said calmly. “In my position, I hardly like to inquire beyond that. Why does this bother you so much, anyway?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because she thought he took everything away from her, and now he’s taken over her death.”
“I see what you mean, but there really isn’t anyone else. Her parents live in Maine, her brother’s in the Midwest, and the children are too young to plan anything.” She paused tactfully. “I don’t think she’s very close to anyone in her family.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I admitted.
“No. Well. Tricia’s staying in the background, naturally, but Barclay will host a reception afterward for the mourners. They’ve suggested contributions to the La Jolla Alliance against Substance Abuse in lieu of flowers, but of course the firm will send both.”
“Hmmm,” I said, noncommittally.
“It’ll be fine,” Susan said reassuringly. “You’ll see.”
I thanked her and hung up, and I was standing in the kitchen rolling out the crust for a quiche Lorraine (I know, I know. It’s out of style and definitely bad for you, but I like it anyway.) when it hit me. Barclay was getting in one last dig at Eleanor with his suggested contributions to the La Jolla Alliance, et al. It was as good as proclaiming that she was a pill junkie. Well, maybe she was, though I never saw evidence of any addiction other than the desire for revenge on her ex-husband. I stood there pulling pie crust off the cool marble and pictured Tricia Lindera Hampton stepping into her walk-in closet on the morning of the funeral and pulling out the perfect Second-Wife dress: something sympathetic but not hypocritical. Dove gray, not black. And Barclay, greeting the guests with a firm handshake and eyes ever-so-slightly moist.
And I just knew Eleanor would have hated it. Hated it.
I decided the time had come to have a look at the contents of that box.
3
Reading the contents of Eleanor’s box was like perusing the diary of a distraught and somewhat neurotic adolescent. Jason would have called her a “real dork.” If you ever kept a diary as a teenager, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
When I was fifteen, I asked a boy from another school to go to our spring formal. These days, girls call Jason with daunting regularity, determination crackling in their voices like static on the line, but back then it required courage to brave his mother’s courteous but slightly disapproving tone when she summoned him to the receiver (how well I understand that, now that I am the one fielding the calls!), and to brazen out the automatic presumption of forwardness that always attended any act where the girl made the first move. I found myself apologetic and hideously embarrassed. The phone was slick in my hand. My face was hot, and my voice was breathy and nervous.
How do I remember all this? Because any time I want to, I can relive every painful moment of that call by rereading my diary. I don’t want to very often, but sometimes I do, so that I can remind myself how turbulent and dreadful (and bittersweet) adolescence can be. It’s a useful reminder with two teenagers in the house.
The point is, I didn’t leave anything out. It is all there: he said, I said (that was before the “he goes, I go” era, thank God), how many rings it took before the phone was picked up, what I was wearing as I sat on my bed, pushing my damp finger into the rotary, et cetera. I had had a monumental crush on this person for at least a year, and love, apparently, finds no detail too insignificant for scrutiny.
Neither, it would seem, does hatred, which just goes to show that all those psychologists and philosophers who go on about how closely related those two emotions are, are probably right. Certainly the scorching passion that animated Eleanor’s collection of every piece of Barclay Hampton/Eastman, Bartels trivia she could lay her hands on had its roots in some kind of obsession, which might even, under the right circumstances, be called “love.”
I would not have wanted to be the object of it.
In addition to collecting every document of relevance to her divorce and Barclay’s remarriage, and a thick file of Eastman, Bartels client papers—which, I assume, had pertinence to Barclay’s compensation and to her own rightful share of his earnings—she had edited some of the letters and documents with marginalia written in bold print with a scarlet pencil.
Dear Mrs. Hampton, began one letter, an apparent attempt by Barclay’s attorney to stop her from spreading stories about her erstwhile husband all over La Jolla, We have been notified by the manager of the La Jolla Sport and Water Club that on Saturday, May 16 of last year, you became very irate when Mr. Hampton appeared at the club’s swimming pool with his wife, whom you were overheard to call a “two-bit bimbo.” Witnesses have attested that you then screamed that my client, Mr. Hampton, was a “thief and a liar” who “would not have a single client left if the truth were known about him.” After this, the club manager asserts that you threw an ashtray at my client, which, while failing to strike Mr. Hampton, only narrowly missed making contact with Mrs. Hampton’s head.
The letter went on to point out the inadvisability of such statements and behavior, and to threaten legal action if Eleanor did not desist. Someone, presumably Eleanor, had scrawled “I am Mrs. Hampton” and “she is a two-bit bimbo” in the margin, and “Too bad” under “narrowly missed.” “Thief” and “Liar” were underscored so hard there was a hole in the paper.
I wondered fleetingly where Eleanor had found an ashtray at the Sport and Water Club, since hardly anyone smoked these days, but otherwise I felt a little chilled. It was worse than reading someone’s diary; it was almost like living out another person’s bad dream. Like my old adolescent self, Eleanor seemed to have no consciousness of how she came across. Even she, for all her anger, must have shied away from the obsessed, vindictive persona who emerged from the pages, had she had the objectivity to perceive it.
Dear Eleanor, began another letter, dated only a month before she died, I know your first reaction to this letter will be a viole
nt one, but I hope you will calm down before you take any actions which might embarrass yourself or our children any further. Your threats, which are based on a matter you have misunderstood entirely, are nothing short of blackmail, and I intend to treat them as the workings of a sick mind. If you do not desist in this harassment and persecution of myself and my wife, I will be forced to secure a restraining order against you.
I hated that shabby-genteel “myself.” But there was more. Not only that, he wrote, but you will never get a red cent out of me without a court order. If you stand in my way, I have a number of means of cutting your income. You had better think twice before you follow through on your threats.
I could see that lawyerly Barclay had given way to Barclay the irate and irritated. I wondered what threats Eleanor had made against him, since he appeared to be holding all the cards.
I felt like a voyeur, or like a guest at one of those dinner parties everyone seems to have endured at least once where the host and hostess engage in a verbal sparring match for the apparent entertainment of themselves and their audience. I thought of all the fights I had had with Steve before he had left the house, even in the years when our marriage still had vitality, and I knew how much I would hate it if any of it had been in writing for someone else to see. I wondered why Eleanor had wanted me to look through the box. I wouldn’t have wanted my vulnerability so exposed—my privacy shredded and my emotional needs subjected to scrutiny.
I thought about stopping right then, but it was like stumbling on someone having sex in public—embarrassing and inappropriate, but you couldn’t help looking. I decided to put aside the personal letters for the time being in favor of a sheaf of more official-looking papers fastened together with an incongruous hot-pink plastic clip. I didn’t recognize the name on the letterhead, but the text was decipherable, so I knew they couldn’t be legal documents. Dear Mrs. Hampton, read the letter at the top of the stack, Our records indicate that the balance of your account, $2,500, is more than six weeks overdue. We have received your written request for further investigation into the matters we discussed, but, as I outlined for you at the time of your initial consultation, we will be unable to proceed until the balance is paid in full. Without further documentation, the information we provided may not stand up in court, and with this in mind we feel sure that you will want to follow through with our services…
Making Waves Page 4