Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (31 page)

Ginger was right: He’d lost a tooth, maybe more. Gordon tried
to straighten up as Harriet and Laura approached, their steps almost imperceptibly small now. Oh, yes: There would be a smell. “Stay here,” Laura said to Harriet, and Harriet stopped in her tracks, clearly grateful not to have to move any closer.

“It’s Mr. Pitts,” Harriet said.

They were now standing only a few inches away from Gordon’s feet. He slowly rolled his eyes open, saw Laura, and smiled widely.

“There’s my girl!” Gordon said. “Came as soon as I heard.”

Laura slid back, colliding with Harriet, who grasped her shoulders but didn’t say a word.
This is your mess
: That was what Harriet’s silence meant, but she didn’t retreat.

“Gordon, what are you doing here?” Laura didn’t want to get any closer. In addition to the missing teeth, which punctuated his smile like exclamation points, Gordon was missing the ribbon around his hat, a proper shirt, socks. He sat up and leaned against the garage door, nearly knocking the flowers over. Harriet moved a hand forward to catch them. He fingered the card, as if thinking about opening it to see who had been so thoughtful.

“Heard about Irving. Came to pay my respects.” Gordon nodded and then seemed to lose himself to the nodding for a moment, as though all he had to do to be asleep was close his eyes.

“The service was months ago. You’ve missed it, I mean. You really didn’t have to come.” Laura didn’t want to move any closer, but she knew that sooner or later, the girls would be up and clanging around inside the house. Junior would wonder where she was and come outside to sit in the dirt until she returned. Laura had to move Gordon somewhere the children wouldn’t be. “Let’s go out by the pool, Gordon, all right? I think we’ll all be more comfortable out there.”

“Ssssure,” Gordon said, letting the world slip slowly out of his mouth. He pushed himself up to stand, and waved back and forth like a scarecrow.

Laura hurried toward him, nudging Harriet to come along. They each threw one of Gordon’s arms over their shoulders and escorted him back down.

“I love this,” Gordon said. “Heel, toe, heel, toe.” He waggled his hips back and forth. Harriet pinched her nose with her free hand. Gordon smelled like he’d been sleeping in a bus station for a month. Laura heard the front door slam behind them. She tried to think of a way that she could erase this moment from time, from the girls’ memory. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this: Gordon wasn’t supposed to come back. She’d told them nothing—one doting father was enough. Clara’s voice was louder: “Who
is
that?”

They walked in tandem around the back of the house to the pool. Harriet bore most of Gordon’s weight, which wasn’t much. How was it that so many hours of Laura’s life of late had been with one arm tucked around a man’s waist, holding him up from hitting the ground? She wished herself into another scene, another movie, something happier, with talking cars or dogs and a Ferris wheel.

“Fucking amateurs,” Gordon said, as Laura and Harriet set him down, bottom-first, onto a metal recliner.

Laura ignored him. “Where did you come from, Gordon? Are you all right? You really look terrible, you know.”

Gordon took off his hat and set it down beside him. His hair had thinned to a small tuft near his crown and a stringy half circle around the base of his skull. Laura felt as if she were watching him through a scrim. There was nothing in his features that reminded her of the man she married. He wet his lips with his tongue. “Laura Lamont. Look at you.”

Harriet crossed her arms over her chest and made a sharp noise, like a popping balloon. “Can we help you with something, Mr. Pitts?” The love that Laura felt for her grew to twice its size.

Gordon picked up his hat and attempted to twirl it on a finger.
The hat flew off and skidded to the ground. “I remember you,” he said, looking at Harriet with one eye closed. “Well, I did think that such loyalty might be rewarded. After all, those are my two girls out there, ain’t they?”

“You’re asking for money?” Laura tried to remember the circumstances of the agreement. No, she knew them—Gordon had signed away his rights to the girls, and he’d never had any claims on her money. Laura had always belonged to Gardner Brothers, just like Gordon had. Irving’s money had nothing to do with her, and anyway, there wasn’t any more where that was coming from. Gordon had been married to Elsa Emerson, a person who existed only in the moments between when Laura woke up and when she opened her eyes. With all the pills she’d been taking, Laura couldn’t remember the last time Elsa had shown her face in the mirror.

“I’m not
asking
,” Gordon said, putting on a shameless grin. “Isn’t it worth
something
to you that I’m here? For your
husband
?” He spit out the word. “Irving always did like me, if I remember correctly. Don’t you remember, Elsa?”

The door that led from the house to the pool swung open—Clara.

“Mom?” she said, her torso leaning through the doorway. “Maybe you should come inside.”

Gordon turned back to Laura, his head still wobbling on his neck, as if poorly attached. “I always knew I liked that crazy broad.” She had no idea whom he thought he was talking about.

A
fter Gordon bathed in the guest room shower and put on some of Irving’s clean clothes, which Laura told herself she would burn afterward, he sat at the kitchen table and made himself comfortable. Clara and Florence stood with their backs against the island,
staring. Gordon lit each cigarette from the one before it, tapping off the ash before there was a chance for any to accumulate. Laura felt sick to her stomach, and made Harriet do all the talking.

“So, Mr. Pitts, what have you been doing since you left Los Angeles?” Harriet spoke with zero inflection, like a policeman who’d just stopped a weaving car.

Gordon laughed awkwardly. “Since Irving tossed me out, you mean?” He looked at the girls and shook his head. They moved closer together, until there was no space between their bodies. “Been here and there. I got a job in San Francisco, doing a play, but…” His voice trailed off. It was easy enough to imagine what had happened when this Gordon Pitts presented himself for the job. Laura would have fired him on the spot too.

Florence’s eyes never moved off Gordon’s face. Laura could understand why—Clara looked as though she’d been cleaved whole off of Laura’s body, like Eve out of Adam, two parts of a whole. Florence looked far more like her father, with her thin wrists and eyes that slanted like a hungry alligator’s. Out of the three children, Florence was the only one who’d had no human mirror. In Gordon, she could see what she might become. Laura felt proud of her daughter for not leaving the room in tears, as she surely would have done at Florence’s age, and very much wanted to at her own.

“So you’re Clara, and you’re Florence,” Gordon said. He looked the girls up and down like new car models on the lot. They nodded, docile and stunned as lambs. Laura wanted to scream. Everyone waited for Gordon to say something else, to follow up his identification with some mildly paternal line of questioning, but he didn’t. Instead, he lit another cigarette and nodded, turning his attention back to Laura.

“Are you still acting?” Harriet was so patient. It was a tiny trial: Gordon was on the stand; Harriet was the inquiring lawyer; the girls
were the two-headed judge. It was like an episode of
Ginger & Bill
gone off the rails, where the laugh track had been stunned into silence and there would be no happy resolution, no cozy snuggle. Junior was in his room, and Laura wished the imaginary camera would follow him instead, to capture anything but this. Gordon hadn’t been so bad, not in the beginning. The army could have straightened him out, but didn’t. If she could go back, Laura thought, she would still have married him.

Gordon shook his head. He leaned back and shut his eyes, a half-smoked cigarette still clamped between his lips. “You give me the part, man, I could play anything.”

The kitchen was too small to hold both the past and the present, and it was the past that needed to go. Gordon meant nothing to the girls, even if he had once meant something to her—how could he? Even once the filth and booze on his dirty clothes was taken away, there was still a haziness that made Laura uncomfortable. There were other men on the set who’d started to look this way, with paler skin than California allowed, and scabs up and down their arms. Gordon had on long sleeves, and Laura was glad not to be able to see his marks.

“Girls,” Laura said, without taking her eyes off Gordon, “go to your room.”

Clara and Florence scooted sideways, their grown bodies having reverted to childlike movements, leaving the room as quickly as they could without turning their backs. Laura waited for the sound of their footsteps to stop before speaking.

“How much do you want?” Laura was thinking about herself as a teenager, about Gordon’s slippery body inside hers, about the way his mouth looked like Florence’s, with the corners turning down toward his chin. It was all too much, and she needed him gone. It didn’t matter how much money he wanted, she was going to give it to him.
That was what Gordon held over her head, and he knew it: Gordon had been married to her before she’d changed her name, when everything was still ahead of her. But no! That wasn’t it at all. Gordon had been married to Elsa Emerson, the girl who hadn’t been quite good enough for Hollywood, who would have done anything to make her name, even change it. In some basic way, Gordon had been married to the real her, while Irving—her love, her sweet Irving—had been married to a fantasy. Harriet put her hand on Laura’s arm, but she couldn’t stop her. It didn’t matter whether she was giving him all the money she had in the world—Laura wanted Gordon out of her kitchen.

Gordon didn’t seem to mind being talked about. He smoked his cigarette and picked at a fingernail, seemingly oblivious to the anguish he was causing. “I hear you’ve been spending time with my friend Harry. You know we’re friends? I bet he didn’t even mention it. But he mentioned you to me, boy, he sure did. Mentioned the front seat of your car and eeeeeeverything.” Gordon flicked a piece of dirt from under his nail onto the kitchen floor and then looked straight at Laura, malice oozing out of his every pore.

“Five thousand dollars,” Laura said. “I’ll give you five thousand dollars. For you to never come anywhere near my children ever again.” Her jaw was hard, set. It was one thing to be a drunk. But it was clear that Gordon was doing something else, ingesting a worse poison, and yes, Harry was doing it too. Laura had a momentary panic that the drugs could have been transmitted to the girls genetically, but no, that didn’t make sense. The girls were all right, or at least they would be when they recovered from the shock of seeing him.

Gordon rubbed his eyes and appeared to ponder the proposition. When he looked up again, he smiled widely, the black spots where his teeth had been displayed in all their empty glory. “Well, okay,”
he said. “If you insist.” It had all been a wager for Gordon; Laura was sure. There was no money coming from anywhere else, so why not test the familial waters, just to see? Even Harriet, whose steady face hardly ever betrayed a truly unpleasant emotion, looked disgusted. He slid out from behind the table and tipped his hat back on his head.

“I’ll send you a telegram, let you know where to wire the money,” Gordon said, walking jauntily now. Laura half thought that his decrepitude had been part of his scheme, but no, Gordon stumbled on his way to the front door. Laura watched him walk to the end of the driveway and turn onto the road, his small hips wagging from side to side, like he knew she was watching.

I
t was June, and a steady seventy-five degrees. Laura gave Jimmy the day off and sent Harriet on a long list of errands, and had the whole house to herself, just as she’d wanted. She put on her bathing suit and walked out to the pool barefoot. It was a mostly sunny day, but not so warm that most people would be swimming. Laura glanced down the sloping hill to her neighbors’ house, and remembered that she’d wanted to invite them. Not today. Florence and Junior were at school; Clara was at work. As a child, Laura never would have imagined she’d have a swimming pool in her backyard, but, of course, Laura had never actually been a child at all. Elsa Emerson wouldn’t have needed a pool; she would have gone to the beach and let the rough sand slide in between her toes, let it cling to her clothes and hair, her naturally blond hair. It would be darker now, probably, the color of wheat instead of the color of sunshine, but that was almost nicer on a grown-up woman. It was so hard to picture herself that way—Laura
was almost forty, a widowed mother of three. A
widow.
Laura couldn’t even say the word.