After You've Gone (14 page)

They smile, acknowledging some kinship.

“Well, I won't keep you.” Maria begins to leave; then, from whatever inner depths of thought, she remarks, “I do wish Ralph were here too. It would be nice for you to meet him here.”

“It would have been,” agrees Phoebe. “But sometime.”

Lunch, though, is no better than breakfast, conversationally, and in Phoebe's judgment even the food is not entirely successful.

They are gathered again on the terrace above the river, joined at the too large round table—scattered around it.

However, partly because he knows that Phoebe is genuinely curious, as he is himself, Danny persists in asking about Maria's time in jail. (Also, he is convinced that talking about it will help Maria.) “What does Pleasanton look like?” he asks her. “I can't even imagine it.”

“Oh—” At first Maria's vague, unfocused glance goes out to the river, as though for help, but then she seems to make an effort—for her guests. “It's quite country-club-looking,” she tells them. “Very clean and bland.” In a tantalizing way, she adds, “It's rather like the White House.”

“Really? How?” This has been a chorus, from Dan and Phoebe.

Maria sighs, and continues to try. “Well, externally it's so clean, and behind the scenes there's total corruption.” Having gone so far, though, she leans back into her chair and closes her eyes.

Dan looks at Phoebe. On her face he sees both blighted curiosity and genuine if momentary helplessness. He sees too
her discomfort from the increasing heat. Her skin is so bright, dry, pink. The sultry air has curled her hair so tightly that it looks uncomfortable. At that moment Danny believes that he
feels
all Phoebe's unvoiced, unspoken sensations; her feelings are his. And he further thinks, I am married to Phoebe permanently, for good.

And, looking at his wife, and at Maria, whom he has always known, Danny thinks how incredibly complex women are. How
interesting
they are.

“In Maine the air never felt exactly like this air,” Maria tells them, as though Maine had been under discussion—again. “A little like it, fresh and clean, but not exactly. It's interesting. The difference, I mean. Though hard to describe,” she trails off.

“I know what you mean, though,” comments Phoebe. “In the same way that all the colors are different, but you can't exactly say how.”

“Phoebe grew up in New Hampshire,” Danny tells Maria, wondering why this fact had not emerged earlier, or did it?

“Oh, did you really.” But Maria has returned to her own privacy, her thoughts. New Hampshire could be across the continent from Maine, for all of her.

The heat has gathered and intensified. Phoebe feels that she will burst, her skin rent apart, the way a tomato's skin will split in heat. What she also feels is a kind of rage, though she tries to tell herself that she is simply hot, that she feels so ill-tempered only because of the weather, the temperature. And, knowing herself, certain bad tendencies, she determines that she will not
say
how angry she is, and especially she will not take it out on Danny.

I love Dan. The weather is not his fault—nor, really, is absent Ralph. Gross, inconsiderate, totally selfish Ralph. Some friend, thinks Phoebe.

She and Dan are lying across their bed, ostensibly napping, although the turgid air seems entirely to forbid real sleep. Naked, they still do not touch, although earlier Dan has asked, “Can I douse you with some cold water, or maybe an alcohol rub?”

“No thanks, but really, thanks.” (It was at that moment that Phoebe determined not to vent her ire on Dan, who is genuinely kind, well-meaning.)

They have both been whispering, although no one could conceivably hear them, the rooms being so spread apart; Maria's is several rooms away. “Maria simply clutches that prison experience to herself, doesn't she?” now whispers Phoebe. “Not that she much wants to talk about anything else either.”

“Except Maine.” Danny tries a small laugh. “Lots of Maine.”

“And the way she eats,” complains Phoebe bitterly. “Just bolting down a few bites and then a dead stop. It's not exactly flattering. Not that I really care, I mean. Did she always eat like that?”

“I sort of can't remember. Maybe not. I didn't notice, really.”

“I have to say, though,” announces Phoebe, “I really think this is a very selfish move on Ralph's part.”

Dan very lightly sighs, just shifting in bed. “I'm afraid I agree. But people change, I think. Maybe he's pure L.A. these days. More selfish than he used to be. He's been seeing some shrink down there for years.”

“That whole culture's so selfish. Crass.”

“Oh,
right.
”

Feeling a little better, Phoebe reaches her fingers just to
graze the top of Danny's hand. They look at each other; they smile.

Dinner that night, which again is out on the terrace, is in many ways a repeat of lunch, except of course for the menu; provident Phoebe has made a nice cold pasta, with garlicky brandied prawns. But Maria again eats very little, and that most rapidly.

And again she talks about Maine. “The soil was so rocky around our house it was hard to grow flowers,” she says. “I've never even tried to plant anything out here.”

The night is densely dark, pitch black; in an absolute and final way it is still. And heavy; the air seems weighted. Oppressive, stultifying.

“I do wish Ralph could have been here.” It is Dan who has said this, not having at all intended to. It simply slipped out, like a sigh, and now he feels tactless. “But it's great that he has so much work down there,” he feebly amends.

“I suppose so.” Unhelpful Maria puts her fork down and stares out into the black.

Going about the house, as every night he has—checking door locks, turning off lights—for the first time on this visit Danny has a sad sense of spuriousness: this is not his house, he is much more guest than host. And he recalls now that this place has always been somewhat daunting; its proportions make him feel even less tall than in fact he is. And very possibly Phoebe's deepest reactions have been similar? She too has been made uncomfortable by the house, in addition to the appalling heat, her enemy? None of these facts augur poorly for their marriage, though, Danny believes. Once they are back in San
Francisco, in the cool foggy summer weather, in their own newly painted rooms, then they will be fine.

He admits to himself, however, some real disappointment over what he feels as the failure of connection between Maria and Phoebe. When Ralph called about Maria's coming up, just out of jail, along with disappointment at the curtailment of their privacy, Danny experienced a small surge of happy expectation. Maria and Phoebe, despite obvious differences of age, career, could become great friends, a complement to his own friendship with Ralph. And now that this rapport seems entirely unlikely, Danny recognizes the strength of his hope—his conviction, even—that it might have taken place.

Before starting his tour of the house, Dan urged Phoebe to go and take a long cool bath. “Do you a world of good,” he told her. And that presumably is where Phoebe is now, in the bathroom down the hall. (The distance between bathrooms and bedrooms in this house seems an almost deliberate inconvenience.)

As Dan gets into bed, he hears nothing, no sound from anywhere. Outside the window the air is motionless, still; the river is soundless, slow. And although he knows that in a few minutes Phoebe will be there with him, Danny experiences a solitude that seems entire, and final.

And then, around midnight, everything breaks. Brilliant flashes of lightning split open the sky, thunder roars—a sound of huge rocks falling down a mountainside. Slits of light, crashing noise.

Entirely awake, and a little scared, Phoebe abruptly remembers Maria this morning as she talked about thunderstorms in Maine. “Actually, I'd be quite terrified, I always used to be” is what Maria said.

To Dan, who is much less fully awake (he seemed to have trouble going to sleep at all), Phoebe whispers, “I'm just going down to see if Maria's all right.”

Slipping into her sandals, pulling on her light cotton robe—in the new blessed cool!—Phoebe begins to feel her way down the narrow, pine-smelling hall to Maria's room at the end, the room nearest the river.

Seeing no light beneath the door, she hesitates, but then very gently she knocks, at the same time saying firmly and loudly enough to be heard across the thunder crashes, “It's Phoebe.”

For a moment there is no response at all; then some faint sound comes from Maria that Phoebe chooses to interpret as assent.

Entering, she sees Maria upright in bed, sitting erect but pressed back, braced against the headboard. “Oh” is all she says to Phoebe.

Coming over to stand beside her, Phoebe asks, “Should I turn the light on?” and she reaches toward the bedside lamp, on its table.

Maria stops her, crying, “Electricity—don't!”

Recognizing true panic, Phoebe quietly tells her, “I'll just stay here for a minute, if you don't mind.”

In the strange half-light between crashes, Maria reaches for her hand. She says, “Thank you,” and can just be seen to smile before quickly releasing Phoebe.

Outside, a heavy pounding rain has now begun, but the thunderstorm seems suddenly to be over; there is only the hard drumbeat of rain on the shingled roof, the thud of water on windowpanes.

Phoebe pulls the small bentwood chair from Maria's desk over to the bed, and sits down.

Maria says, “It was good of you to remember.”

“I was a little scared,” admits Phoebe.

“The thing about prison,” Maria takes this up as though prison had just then been under discussion, “is that they do everything to wreck your mind. ‘Mind-fuck,' some of the younger women called it.” A faint, tight smile. “But they do. Rushing you all the time. Starting you in to do something, and then right away it's over. Even eating, even that horrible food I never got to finish. And they mix up everyone's mail so you think it must be on purpose. And the noise. Radios. And people smoking.”

“Jesus” is all Phoebe can manage to say.

Maria is leaning forward now, her eyes luminous, deep, immense. “At my age,” she says. “I mean, I often wonder where my mind is going anyway, without all that.”

“That's frightful. Terrible.”

“Well, it was terrible. I didn't want to admit it to myself. I got just so plain scared. The truth is I'm still scared.”

“Well, of course. Anyone is scared of jail. I'm not even sure I could do it.”

Maria's gaze in the semi-dark seems to take all of Phoebe in. “I think you would if you had to, or thought you had to,” she says.

“I hope so.”

“But I'm worried about going back there,” Maria tells her. “If for some reason I had to. Again.”

At that moment, however, a new sound has begun, just audible through the steady, heavy rain. And lights can be seen to approach the house, very slowly.

Lights from a car, now visible to them both. Unnecessarily, Phoebe announces, “Someone's coming. A small sports car. Whoever—?”

“It must be Ralph,” says Maria, smiling. And she exclaims, “Oh, I do think things will be better now. It's even got cool,
do you feel it?” But in an anxious way her face still searches Phoebe's. “Do you want to turn on the light?”

Phoebe reaches to touch Maria's hand, very quickly, lightly—before she pushes the switch.

Standing up, then, in the sudden brightness, smiling, as Phoebe moves toward the door she turns back to Maria; she tells her, “I'll get Danny. We'll go make sandwiches—some tea? Poor Ralph, all that driving. We'll celebrate!”

Tall and too thin, sometimes stooped but now bent bravely forward into the wind, old Duncan Elliott heads southward in Central Park, down a steep and cindery path—his scattered, shamed, and tormented mind still alert to the avoidance of dangerously large steel baby carriages, and of runners (he must not be run down by babies or by runners, he cautions himself). But most of his thoughts are concentrated on the question of comparative evils: of all that has befallen him lately, and particularly today, what is worse—or, rather, which is worst of all? To have been abandoned by one's fourth and one had hoped final wife, or to have made a total fool of oneself discussing that event—even trying, as it were, to explain it away.

Duncan is a distinguished professor, now an emeritus at a large Midwestern university (for all the good that is doing him now); his wife Cath left the month before, in hot September. Disconsolately traveling to New York, in part to cheer himself up, along with some publishing business, Duncan forgot the possibility of chill late October breezes.

Or—he continues his plaintive litany—is the worst thing
of all to have broken off and lost an old, much filled and refilled tooth, leaving what must be a conspicuously ugly black hole in the forefront of one's mouth? Oh, what matter which is worse! thinks Duncan then. All of these things have happened (the most recent being the tooth, which only came to his attention out here in the cold) and he can stand none of them.

The runners that Duncan encounters along his way are grim-faced, red, and sweaty, and the young mothers pushing those carriages are scruffy, sloppily dressed; and the babies are—well, babies. Where are the handsome, glamorous pairs of lovers that one used to glimpse in New York, in Central Park? Duncan asks this wistful question of himself, and then he answers (insanely!): On Ocracoke Island. For it is to Ocracoke that Cath has run off with her poet, and in his mind Duncan has just seen the two of them, Cath and Brennan O'Donahue (of all corny, false-literary names), Brennan as handsome and fair as Cath herself is—he sees Brennan and Cath and scores of other couples, all young and blond, all healthy and beautiful, and running, running like horses, on a wild and endless beach.