After You've Gone (11 page)

Her voice trailed off into a total silence, and I thought, Oh dear, she's fallen asleep at the telephone, out there in California, in that house I know so very well. The house right next door to the house where my parents and I used to live—in fact, its architectural twin—on what was called the Santa Barbara Gold Coast, up above the sea. I wondered what room Jennifer was in—her own room, in bed, I hoped. I called out “Jennifer!” over all that space, Minnesota to California. Calling out over time too, over many years.

Her laugh came on again. “Oh, Jude, you thought I'd gone to sleep. But I hadn't, I was just lying here thinking. In Mother and Dad's big old bed. You remember?”

“Oh, of course I do.” And with a rush I remembered the Sunday morning when Jennifer and I had run into the Cartwrights' bedroom, I guess looking for the Sunday papers, and there was blond Scott and blonder Nickie in their tousled nightclothes, lying back among a pale-blue tangle of sheets. Not making love, although I think we must have caught them
soon after love. They may have moved apart as we came in; Scott's hand still lingered in Nickie's bright, heavy uncombed hair. At the time, I was mostly struck by their sleepy affection for each other, so clearly present. I can see it now, those particular smiles, all over their pale morning faces.

The room, with its seascape view, was almost identical to my parents' bedroom, and their view. My parents slept in narrow, separate beds. They were silent at home except when they drank, which loosened them up a little, though it never made them anywhere near affectionate with each other.

In any case, I surely remembered the Cartwrights' broad, blue-sheeted carved-mahogany bed.

I asked Jennifer, “Your father—Scott died too?” Although I think I knew that he must have. But I used to see Scott Cartwright as the strongest man I ever knew, as well as the most glamorous, with his golfer's tan, and his stride.

“Just after your mother died. They were all so young, weren't they? Dad had a stroke on the golf course, but maybe that's the best way to go. Poor Mother was sick for years. Oh, Judy, it's all so scary. I hate to think about it.”

She had begun to trail off again, and partly to keep her awake, in contact, I asked her if she had married more than once; I thought I had heard her say “husbands,” plural, but it was hard to tell, with her vagueness, slurring.

But “Oh, three times!” Jennifer told me. “Each one worse. I never seem to learn.” But she sounded cheerful, and next she began to laugh. “You will not believe what their names were,” she said. “Tom, Dick, and Harry. That's the truth. Well, not actually the whole truth—I can't lie to my best old favorite friend. The whole truth is, the first two were Tom and Dick, and so when I went and got married the third time I had to call him Harry, even if his name was Jack.”

I laughed—I had always laughed a lot with Jennifer—but at the same time I was thinking that people from single, happy marriages are supposed to marry happily themselves. They are not supposed to make lonely, drunken phone calls to old, almost forgotten friends.

Mostly, though, I was extremely pleased—elated, even—to have heard from Jennifer at all, despite the bad signs, the clear evidence that she was not in very good shape. As we hung up a few minutes later, I was aware of smiling to myself, the happy recipient of a happy birthday present. And like most especially welcome, sensitive presents, this gift from Jennifer was something that I had not known I needed, but that now I could no longer do without: a friend for talking to.

I went out for dinner with my new beau in a rare light-hearted mood, but I may have seemed more than a little abstracted. I was thinking of Jennifer, her parents, and California.

When Jennifer and I were friends, all that time ago, I truly loved her, but I also coveted almost everything about her: her golden curls, small plump hands, her famously sunny disposition, but most especially and most secretly I envied her her parents. I wanted them to be mine.

I have since learned (hasn't everyone?) that this is a common fantasy; Freud tells us that many children believe they have somehow ended up with the wrong set of parents. But at the time I naturally did not know this; guiltily I felt that only I had such an evil wish, to be rid of my own parents and moved in with another set. If it could somehow be proved, I thought, that I had been stolen by this dark and somber couple with whom I lived, while all along I was really a Cartwright
child—then I would be perfectly happy. And if Jennifer's parents were mine, then of course Jennifer and I would be truly sisters, as so often we spoke of wishing that we were.

From the moment I saw them, even before seeing Jennifer, I was drawn to Scott and Nickie Cartwright, a tanned couple getting out of a new wood-paneled station wagon to look at a house for sale, the house next door to our house. I liked their bright splashy clothes, and the easy, careless way they walked and laughed; I wanted them to be the people to buy that house.

I thought that they looked too young to be parents; that they turned out to have a little girl just my age was a marvelous surprise, a bonus, as it were.

My own parents did not like the look of the Cartwrights, at first. “Lots of flash” was my Vermont mother's succinct summation. And my father's: “That garden they're buying needs plenty of solid work. I hope they know it.” But fairly soon the four grown-ups took to dropping in on each other for a cup of coffee or a Coke, maybe, during the day; and at night they all got together for drinks. The Cartwrights, from St. Louis, had a sort of loose-style hospitality to which even my fairly stiff-mannered parents responded.

What must initially have won my stern parents' approval, though, was the Cartwrights' total dedication to their garden. Even before actually moving in, they began to spend their weekends digging among the dahlias, pruning hibiscus, trimming orange blossoms, and probing the roots of ivy. And once they lived there, all during the week beautiful Nickie in her short red shorts could be observed out clipping boxwoods, often mowing the lawn. And watering everything.

On weekends, around dusk if not sooner, the four of them would start in on their Tom Collinses, gin rickeys, or fruity concoctions with rum. Eventually one of the grown-ups (usually
Nickie Cartwright) would remember that Jennifer and I should have some supper, and the two men (probably) would go out for some fried clams or pizza. Later on they would pretty much forget all about us, which was fine with Jennifer and me; we could stay up as long as we liked, giggling and whispering.

All the grown-ups that I knew at that time drank; it was what I assumed grown-ups did when they got together. Jennifer and I never discussed this adult habit, and “drunk” is not a word we would have used to describe our parents, ever. “Drunk” meant a sort of clownish, TV-cartoon behavior.

My parents as they drank simply talked too much; they told what seemed to me very long dull stories having to do with Santa Barbara history, early architects, all that. The Cartwrights, being younger, listened politely; Nickie laughed a lot, and they sat very close together.

Certainly my parents were never clownish or even loud; God knows they were not. In a bitter, tight-mouthed way they might argue at breakfast; a few times (this was the worst of all) I could hear my mother crying late at night, all by herself.

Because I had never heard them do so, I believed that the Cartwrights never argued, and I was sure that beautiful happy Nickie Cartwright never cried, and maybe she did not.

In the days that succeeded that first phone call from Jennifer, I thought considerably about her, about her parents, and mine. With terrible vividness I remembered the strength of my yearning for the Cartwrights, and I was assailed—again!—by the sheer intensity of all that childhood emotion, my earliest passions and guilts and despairs.

Quite as vividly, though, I also remembered the simple fun that we used to have, Jennifer and I, as children, especially on
the beach. Since I had always lived there in Santa Barbara, on the California coast, and the Cartwrights were originally from inland Missouri, I was Jennifer's guide to the seashore. Bravely kicking our sneakers into tide pools, Jennifer and I uncovered marvels: tiny hermit crabs, long swaying seaweed, all purple. Anemones. Jennifer would squeal at dead fish, in a high, squeamish way, as I pretended not to mind them.

I also showed Jennifer the more sophisticated pleasures of State Street, the ice-cream parlors and the hot-dog stands. As we both grew up a little, I pointed out the stores. Tweeds & Weeds, my mother's favorite, was always too conservative for the Cartwright ladies, though. Nickie loved frills and lots of colors; she dressed herself and Jennifer in every shade of pink to tangerine. My mother ordered almost all of my clothes from the Lilliputian Bazaar, at Best & Company.

Undoubtedly the tide pools and my happy fascination with them to a great extent determined my later choice of a career, although a desire to displease and/or shock my parents must have figured largely also. Biology to them connoted sex, which in a general way they were against.

And possibly in some way of my own I made the same connection. In any case, I am forced to say that so far I have shone neither professionally nor in a romantic way. I did achieve a doctorate, and some years later an assistant professorship, at relatively early ages, but I do not feel that I will ever be truly distinguished.

As one of my more kindly professors put it, my interest in marine biology could be called aesthetic rather than scientific. I excel at drawing—urchins, starfish, snails.

As to my romantic history, it got off to a shaky start, so to
speak, with my marriage to a fellow biologist, a man who after two years of me announced that colleagues should not be married to each other. (This could be true, but it had been his idea, originally.) He left me for a kindergarten teacher in Chicago, where his next teaching job happened to be. I became involved with an elderly musicologist, who was married; later with a graduate student in speech and drama, who, I came to believe, used coke, a lot of it.

Three men, then—my husband and two subsequent lovers—who presented certain problems. However, surely I do too? I am hardly “problem-free” or even especially easy to get along with. I am moody, hypersensitive, demanding.

In any case, these days as far as men are concerned I am running scared.

After that first birthday call, Jennifer telephoned again, and again. She seemed to have an unerring instinct for the right time to call, not an easy feat with me. (I once knew a man who always called me when I was brushing my teeth; I used to think that if I really wanted to hear from him I had only to get out my toothbrush.) In Jennifer's case, though, it may have been that I was simply so glad to hear from her.

I gathered that her present life was quite reclusive; she did not seem to know where anyone else whom we had known was now. I gathered too that she was quite “comfortably off,” to use an old phrase of my mother's. My mother thought “rich” a vulgar word, and perhaps it is. Anyway, I was very glad that Jennifer was comfortable.

As I got used to talking to Jennifer again, sometimes I would find myself scolding her. You should get out more, take walks, get exercise, I would say. Go swimming—there must
be a pool around. And what about vitamins? Do you eat enough? And Jennifer would laugh in her amiable way, and say she was sure I was absolutely right.

Jennifer's memory for long-gone days was extraordinary, though. She reminded me of the day we decided that to be kidnapped would be a thrilling adventure. We put on our best dresses and paraded slowly up and down State Street, conversing in loud voices about how rich (we liked the word) our parents were. Yachts, Spanish castles, trips on the
Queen Mary
, penthouses in New York—we mentioned all the things the movies had informed us rich people had, and did.

“You had on your striped linen,” Jennifer perfectly recalled, “and I was wearing my lavender dotted swiss.” She laughed her prolonged, slow chuckle. “We just couldn't understand why no one picked us up. Rich and adorable as we were. You remember, Jude?”

Well, I would not have remembered, but Jennifer brought it all back to me, along with our beach walks, the beautiful tide pools, the white sand, the rocks.

I began to look forward to those phone calls. I felt more and more that my connection with Jennifer was something that I had badly missed for years.

I believe I would have enjoyed talking to Jennifer under almost any circumstances, probably, but that particular fall and winter were bad times for me—and seemingly the rest of the world: Ethiopia, Nicaragua. In the American Midwest, where I was, unemployment was rife, and terrible. And to make everything worse the snows came early that year—heavy, paralyzing.

In a personal way, that snowed-in, difficult winter, things were especially bad: I was not getting along at all with my latest beau, the man who came to take me out to dinner on the night of Jennifer's first phone call. This was particularly
depressing since we had got off to a very, very good start—not fireworks, not some spectacular blaze that I would have known to distrust, but many quiet tastes in common, including cats (he had five, an intensely charming fact, I thought, and they all were beautiful tabbies). The truth was that we were quite a lot alike, he and I. Not only our tastes but our defects were quite similar. We were both wary, nervy, shy. Very likely we both needed more by way of contrasting personality—although his former wife had been a successful actress, flamboyant, a great beauty, and that had not worked out too well, either. In any case, we further had in common the fact of being veterans of several mid-life love affairs, both knowing all too well the litany of the condition of not getting along. We exhibited a lessening of interest in each other in identical ways: an increase in our courtesy level. We pretended surprise and pleasure at the sound of each other's voice on the phone; with excruciating politeness we made excuses not to see each other. (At times it occurred to me that in some awful way I was becoming my parents—those super-polite role models.) And then we stopped talking altogether, my lover and I.