Carry the One (28 page)

When Sylvie had finished singing her set plus three encores, she repaired to a stool at the end of the bar, was served a martini nearly as big as her head, and greeted fans while Jean sold copies of her new CD—
Tristesse et Lillet
.

Maude was also called on to autograph a few cocktail napkins. She was still recognized quite often as Ginger Slade. Guys would come up to her and Alice wherever—the grocery store, on the street—and whip around in a 360 as they pulled an invisible gun from the small of their back, Ginger’s signature move, the one she did in the intro, backed up by the show’s theme song.

She was extremely good-natured about this being what she was most recognized for.

“It’s not like I ever did Antigone or Mamet. I was lucky to get that part. Ginger’s funding my retirement.”

She and Alice grabbed a booth, then Nick found them and slid in. And then Tom was there, insinuating himself. “All right if I join you?”

Whenever Alice saw Tom now, she also saw him as he was that night—his aw-shucks smile as he stood there in the gray moonlight, his guitar slung over his shoulder, suggesting that he just take off. As if he was lighter than what had happened, and could just evaporate into the void. She looked around the table and saw each of them as they looked that night, at Carmen’s wedding—Tom lean and badboy, Nick with his mane of hair and his bridal gown, Maude naked. All of them in their last hours of making mistakes with small prices.

Tom said, “Well, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, here’s a club I don’t really want to join, but unfortunately I am already a member.”

“I think we could all say the same,” Alice said. “Nobody wants to be in this particular clubhouse.” Silence settled on them like a pall. Inside the din of the bar, the silence at the table entered the realm of negative sound.

Maude finally said, “Are we waiting for something? Some redemptive moment? Some
closure
? Like we beat our breasts together and we’re all forgiven?”

Nick, staring at Tom’s glass of whatever on the rocks, said, “Bits of our energy fused together that night. Soldered filaments on the cosmic web.”

“I hate when you talk voodoo science crap,” Maude said.

“I’m sorry you feel that way.” This was a phrase Nick had picked up from the million rehab meetings he’d sat through.

Alice said, “I do think there’s a connection between us all. There’s never a day she’s not with us. We keep carrying her forward, and it takes all of us to do that.”

Tom said, “Of course what we have here is only the Passenger Club. Those of us whose worst crime was simply being along for an extremely unfortunate ride. Where is the driver now? Does she have any regrets about the burden she put on us with her recklessness?”

At this, Nick stood up, and before leaving, picked Tom’s hat off his head, dropped it on the floor, and stepped on it. “Interesting spin on the matter, my friend. Now I’m going to leave before you try to get us pissed off at the girl for ruining our lives by dying in front of our car.”

“Tom is such a lovely human,” Alice said when she and Maude were in the car, on their way home. “I didn’t understand until tonight that the accident was actually about him.”

“But great that he’s forgiven himself,” Maude said. “Must be nice. Why can’t I do that?”

“Hey. You did the best you could that night.”

“Not really. Everyone was counting on me. I was supposed to be the medical expert. But I’d barely started nursing school. Of course I should have known how to do CPR, but I was hazy on it. I was modeling for Field’s then. You remember. I had to miss classes for photo shoots. So that night I was punting. Honestly, I think I was working off a poster I saw once on a lifeguard chair.”

“She was still alive when we got to her. I remember you felt a pulse.”

“But so feathery. I probably couldn’t have saved her even if I’d known what I was doing—she was pretty busted up—but of course I’ll never know. I will never fucking know.”

Maude was straightforward this time around. She had come back to Alice to make a partnership. She was less dramatic about everything. She liked being a nurse again. Every week, she worked two twelve-hour shifts at the hospital. Extra money came in from a new job for a high-end catalog with a Western theme. Her slightly weathered looks, her thick, tangled hair now streaked with silver, gave her the air of a woman accustomed to hard chores, someone who smelled a little of horse stalls. A fantasy the company thought would prompt city-bound women to buy overpriced stonewashed denim and chunky turquoise-and-silver jewelry. And there was something subtly hot about the mix of younger face, older hair.

In spite of time and change, there was still some of the old Maude left. She was still a teenage guy in bed. Still a big reader, a big talker. A huge supporter of Alice’s career. (At the opening of the show at Handel, Maude had been so enthusiastic Alice worried people would think she was a shill.) She was still totally invasive. She went through Alice’s mail, her drawers, the paintings in her racks. She picked bits of nut from between Alice’s teeth, Q-tipped wax from her ears. Alice had mixed sentiments about this, the sentiments being (a) thrilled, and (b) wanting to run from the room screaming. But for the most part, she was the Maude whom Alice would have said she wanted all along. But instead of seeming more reasonable, practical, or grown-up, this
perfected version of Maude seemed smaller, diminished by her easy acceptance of reduced circumstances. A great part of her old charm, it would seem, was her arrogance and the way she held herself just beyond Alice’s reach. Without it, she was less likely to flee, but definitely more ordinary.

Because of her hospital schedule, she was either not around at all, or sleeping, or around a lot. On her days off, she lay stretched out on the sofa reading Victorian novels.

“Do you want to go out for lunch?” she asked. “To the diner?”

“I need to finish this section so I can leave it to dry.” Maude had no idea how much Alice worked, how many days slipped into nights in the studio. How many weekdays flowed into work weekends. How much of Alice’s time was now taken up, not just with painting, but with the business of being a painter—openings and interviews, lectures and mentoring. While Maude was away, Alice’s life had gotten a whole lot bigger. “Maybe you should go without me.”

“No, that’s okay,” Maude said. She didn’t start buffing her nails or noisily ruffling a magazine, but an aura of restlessness definitely gathered up around her.

This time around Alice could see Maude more holistically, as opposed to just looking at the side that faced her. She saw that Maude was a good daughter to a difficult mother. Marie was still massively controlling, but now with arthritis and deteriorating eyesight. Many doctor visits were involved. Maude took her to these and they indulged themselves in family gossip and the
People
magazines in waiting rooms, and Maude came home with a temporarily smaller and more judgmental worldview. At first Alice could tease her about this, but after a while Maude became a little defensive. She loved her mama.

When they decided it was time for Maude to move in with Alice, they were up against the cat issue. Maude had one—Archie. Alice was allergic. She thought this was going to be a big deal and was prepared to take antihistamines, whatever was necessary, but then suddenly the cat was out of the picture.

“Where’s Archie?”

“Oh. I took him to Anti-Cruelty. You couldn’t live with all that fur around you.”

In the face of this generous gesture, Alice couldn’t really say “you dumped your cat?! Just like that!”

The cat was a problem. The cat was gone. A lot of how Maude worked in the world was like this. Frighteningly expeditious.

The catalog gig got bigger. Maude went into high gear. Personal trainer, four-times-a-week yoga classes. She got expensive haircuts; Alice saw the credit-card slip from one and decided it was a subject they should never talk about. Sometimes Alice would come into the bedroom to find Maude standing on her head in front of
Who Wants to be a Millionaire
(which seemed not truly in the spirit of yoga). She had biweekly facials, monthly peels. She tanned in a measured way in the basement of her health club. Alice’s bathroom filled with eyecups, ankle weights, exfoliants for different body parts. There was nothing to be inferred from any of this. It was all simply part of Maude’s job.

Maude was not interested in opening up her years in L.A. for Alice’s inspection. When Alice asked, Maude answered, but edited. The guy she lived with who rented out period cars to the studios was “kind of a refuge,” but from what she didn’t say. The cameraman husband was “mostly just a beard. You can’t know how creepy those paparazzi maniacs are. They have these huge lenses and wait until you bring out the garbage or something. So you never bring out the garbage, and if you want to get them off your back about who you’re dating, you get married to someone.” She didn’t go into the actual dating that had to be covered up. That was an edit.

Alice tried to hang on to her role as the supplicant, shouldering the burden of keeping Maude interested. She couldn’t admit, until the fourth or fifth occurrence, that she was experiencing short, slick patches when her interest slid off Maude. And after that came a long-ish while during which Alice thought, well a little boredom sure, wasn’t
that a part of being in something long term? Wasn’t it healthy even? And in their case, an overdue bit of balancing?

They took French-cooking lessons together. They doted on Gabe, loved being aunties together. In the spring, they took a vacation to England, to see him and to take a bus tour of castles and gardens that turned out to be twenty-seven retirees and the two of them. They really tried to talk about issues as they came up, not to let them fester. By rough addition, this should have been enough to count as building a new history. But it wasn’t. It felt to Alice more like they were playing house, with small props—a cappuccino maker, matching rings. Marking off time together with small celebrations. The architecture wasn’t, in the end, weight-bearing; the walls were bending inward. Maybe, Alice worried, she had been rendered incapable of love, maybe these past years had only made her extremely deft at longing.

Nothing dramatic occurred. No one threw crockery. There weren’t really any arguments. No one had an affair. No distraction came into the picture.

She asked Jean, “Am I crazy? Or maybe I’m a terrible person.”

“Maybe you’re just not in love with her anymore. In spite of putting us all through holy hell over her.”

“But how could that be possible?”

“Never discount the power of time,” Jean said. “Time is always a player.”

They didn’t break up, really. It was much more stretched out and fatiguing and sadder. Maude signed an extended contract with the catalog—Lone Pine Ranch. They posed her sitting with a breakfast tray crafted of gnarled twigs, emoting comfort on a sofa draped with handmade serapes, walls hung with lithographs of pueblos. She projected casual domesticity in a breakfast scene with her happy photo family and a few authentic-looking ranch hands. She pushed playfully against a middle-aged husband (hunky and bare-chested in jeans) in front of a charming,
old-fashioned medicine cabinet. That sort of thing. The company was headquartered in Tucson, and Maude needed to be there for catalog shoots. Her contract was only for a year, so the plan was that she would bounce between here and there for a while, then come back to Chicago.

Nothing is ever completely tidy. The particular slick they hit was a long, terrible afternoon with a lot of crying and very little sense making. Bogus resolutions got made about a future together. Some desperate sex cropped up. Nothing changed.

From there, little knots began to turn up in the conversational tapestry. Maude had a dishwasher installed in her apartment down there. She took a two-year membership at a gym in spite of having only the one-year contract for the job. When Alice visited her for a long weekend, she saw a book on Maude’s coffee table. A photo essay of Vietnam. Because Maude had never expressed the slightest interest in Vietnam, Alice understood it was brought over and left behind by someone who hadn’t been mentioned.

Then Alice accepted an artist-in-residence position at Pratt for the coming semester.

“It’s as easy to commute between New York and Tucson as Chicago and Tucson,” she told Maude. They talked like this now—gorgeous, decorated lies spilling from their mouths as they waved at each other from farther and farther off.

From here Alice fell into the darkest place, bottomless; there was no end to this freefall. The loss was one she couldn’t have predicted. She had been left without the specter of Maude, the shimmer at the horizon that had always been her. Now that Alice was no longer waiting for Maude, she was no longer waiting for anything.

triage

The afternoon sky was opaque, horizonless, the olive green of an army blanket, sloughing off a heavy fog. Snow was headed in. They pulled up in front of Nick’s latest apartment, a bleak, tan brick courtyard building just off Ridge. A wicked wind buffeted the car, inside they had the heater on high. Carmen jingled a set of keys to his apartment while Alice, in the driver’s seat, her hands still on the steering wheel, started singing along with “Silver Springs,” which was playing on the oldies station.

“Was I just a fool?”
she sang, backing up Stevie Nicks.

They were building up enough momentum to get out of the car.

There was a time when Nick’s chaos and freefall seemed darkly glamorous to Alice. All those shady messages on his phone machine. His allusions to sordid evenings in the company of strangers. There was a time when she would have liked to see what one of those nights looked like. Now though, he no longer had a presence in the larger abyss. These days, most of his binges played out in his apartment.

Alice lifted her forehead off the steering wheel. “Now when I try to imagine a life for him, I can only see something very small. He shouldn’t really have a car. It’s only a matter of time before he runs into an abutment.”