Listening to Billie (2 page)

Eliza was unpleasantly struck by what he had said, and she thought, perhaps unkindly, that he was not really sophisticated enough to get away with a remark of that sort. Or was he testing her sophistication? Also, since they almost never made love, what he said could only be depressing.

But then, in the following months, as it became clear that Evan was truly, obsessionally in love with that beautiful boy, Eliza experienced a sort of relief: his distaste for her was not her fault; she was not a distasteful person, she was simply a woman.

She was much less shocked by the idea of actual homosexuality than Evan was (it was not the same as jokes about Security Risks), and thus—or so she felt the situation—she was faced with two necessities: one, of comforting Evan, of saying that what he felt was all right (she was not worried about scandal; guilty Evan would not “make a pass” at that beautiful boy, would only follow him around helplessly); and two, of separating herself from him.

Because of Catherine, it was more immediately practical for Evan to move out, and so he did, discreetly, to a local inn, called The Ark—an ancient, looming place, in which both Josephine and Eliza’s half-sister, Daria Paulus, had stayed for occasional visits.

Once they were divorced, Eliza planned to move to California.

One night, alone, in The Ark, Evan took an overdose of sleeping pills along with his bourbon.

Seeing his dead face while she was still in shock—just before the rush of namable emotions, the grief and guilt and rage—Eliza first thought, How strange; how happy he looks now.

With Evan’s insurance money, and with a little of her own capital, Eliza was able to buy, at last, a small cottage in San Francisco, on the eastern slope of Russian Hill. A small hilltop house from which enormous views were visible: a sweep of the Bay, Treasure Island and the long Bay Bridge, the hills of Oakland and Berkeley. Boats, and lights and stars. And the situation of the house was perfect, as people were apt to say. Its being on a cul-de-sac insured some privacy and safety—although parking was a considerable problem, which was one of the reasons that Eliza did not own a car. (Others were ideological; she disapproved of their fumes, and the
danger
of cars.)

Her house had the shape of a drawing by a child: square, with a tall chimney and symmetrically slanted roof. Two large rooms upstairs, separated by a hall and a bathroom, and downstairs was the same arrangement: living room, and across the entrance hall a generous kitchen-dining room. Compact, complete.

In the living room there was too much furniture: a lot of smooth bare wood—a carved mantel, salvaged from a wrecking company and lovingly stripped down to its warm mahogany, some small low tables, a rocker. Refinishing furniture was a minor occupation but a major pleasure of Eliza’s. She had a sensual feeling for wood, for its smooth unvarnished touch. She
even enjoyed the messier aspects of stripping it, the Jasco and steel wool, fine sandpaper and turpentine.

The upholstered things, the big sofa and three club chairs, were soft and somewhat shabby; Eliza, who was
not
handy at upholstery, had attempted to do it herself.

However, the total effect of the house was generous and comfortable, if a little disheveled. It overflowed, literally, with books and records and magazines, usually with music and flowers and good smells of food.

And at that time of her life Eliza’s visual effect was rather like that of her house; she, too, often looked a little disheveled, though attractive and comfortable; a generously built small woman. And just as her house beneath its surface mess was clean, so she was fastidious about baths and underclothing, but often wore jeans that were stained with Jasco or olive oil—something—and often old shabby sweaters.

Sometimes a man who was in love with Eliza would feel that the house was too perfect, too complete, as the same man might feel that Eliza as a woman was too independent, that there was no room for him. A man whom she saw sometimes, whom she thought of as The Lawyer, felt an exclusion by the house, and he had no better house to offer Eliza—Eliza and her daughter Catherine. On the other hand, for another man, The Consul, an intense, illicit lover of a few years back—for The Consul’s purposes that house was ideal; it suited his dashing arrivals, often for brief visits while taxis waited expensively below. And on the many occasions when it was
impossible
for him to arrive, the thought of Eliza’s house assuaged his guilt; there she would be, nevertheless, safe and comfortable in her attractive house, among her records and her books, with her delightful small daughter for company.

During the summer after Billie Holiday died, or killed herself, was killed—one could take any view—after that bad July night (Eliza reacted to the death in a violent, personal way), she
did not play Billie’s records, but sometimes, with a morbid insistence, they came over the radio, unbidden.

On one such night, that August, Eliza was sitting with a new young man, with whom she had earlier had dinner; he was neither a Lawyer nor a Consul; she was not quite sure what he did. Red-haired, slightly plump, a Boston accent. He had been told to “look up” Eliza by her half-sister, Daria, ten years younger than Eliza, now in school in Boston.

From outside, a mean California summer wind enwrapped the house, its threatening whine clearly audible above the music, above Billie’s song. And perhaps for that reason—the wind—otherwise inexplicable tears came close to Eliza’s eyes, and she turned to the young man as though he might be of help.

Possibly, probably, later on they would make love; his proprietary hand on Eliza’s knee made it clear that he believed that would happen, although as she thought of this, looking at him and even smiling, Eliza realized that she didn’t want to—she wished that she were alone. And she discovered in herself some warning, some certain sign of an approaching danger. For one thing, she did not come close to weeping every time she listened to Billie, even now; she was not so sentimental as that. And it had been years since she wept over Evan Quarles.

Catherine was asleep upstairs—Catherine, with whom Eliza had been pregnant as she listened to Billie that night on Fifty-second Street. Thinking of Catherine asleep, Eliza, even with tears in her eyes, considered that her life could be much worse: that bad-sad marriage was over, if dreadfully; her small blond daughter was for the most part a joy. And if she, Eliza, was not doing much—was certainly not doing anything as important as poetry—on the other hand she was coping with her life: her daughter, friends and lovers, the necessary part-time jobs that came her way.

But all in all that evening had been odd, those hours with the new young man. He turned out to be less a friend of Daria’s than of someone named “Smith Worthington,” whom he, the young man, described to Eliza as Daria’s fiancé—although this
could not be true; Daria would have told Eliza. The two women, despite the ten years’ difference in age, were very close. (Daria was Josephine’s child by her third marriage, Eliza by her first.) And the obligatory conversation of two people yoked by an absent third had been curious. Eliza’s feelings about her delicate, difficult, sometimes crazily impulsive sister were strong but not readily expressed. (Daria was sometimes crazily generous: Eliza could hear her thin voice saying to an almost stranger, “Oh, you’re going to San Francisco? Well, you must look up my sister Eliza Quarles.”) How could she talk about Daria to this Bostonian stranger, who was using a pompous word like “fiancé” and an improbable name, “Smith Worthington”? Of his own name, she had all evening been unsure. Bill?

He was curiously monochromatic, that “Bill”; he was all the same pale shade of red. Was that his name, then—Red, not Bill? Very likely his body hair would be the same color—and that decided Eliza: no, she would not make love to anyone with a mat of red hair on his chest. What was odd was that she had even thought that she would, that she
could.
And then she saw what it was strange that she had not seen before: she had for several years been forcing love, or, rather, sex.

After Evan’s death and her move to California, although she met a lot of people, men who took her out, for a while she was obstinately celibate. Even when a man appealed to her, she would turn him down, and later go to bed alone and wonder why; surely no one else would turn out to be like Evan? And then came the period that perhaps just then was ending, a time during which if she liked a man at all or if he seemed to expect it, she would go to bed with him. But not that night. Not Red.

Red began, just then, determinedly to kiss her, grasping and pressing and pulling, as Eliza resisted him, almost absent-mindedly, still thinking.

Then he muttered, “Come on, baby, you know you want it, too,” in an accent quite unlike the one he had been using earlier—tough, threatening, street vowels.

At which she was mobilized, “Get out—go away,” she
managed to say, pulling back from him—as, ghoulishly, on the radio Billie began to sing, “I’ve got a right to sing the blues, I’ve got a right to moan and sigh …”

He didn’t believe her; or he thought that her struggle was a come-on? That she was being coy?

Anyhow, the struggle went on and on; it was purely and simply a fight, the sex had gone out of it. And so, at last, when Eliza said, “Okay, you’re stronger than I am, you’ve proved that,” and lay back on her sofa, submissive, actually she had won.

“Well,
shit.
” Bill, or Red, pulled himself together, and with what dignity he could find he left.

But could he have been a friend of Daria’s? Could Daria have a “fiancé” named Smith Worthington?

Alone, hunched up in her large bed and hearing the louder, more menacing wind, Eliza did not cry, although that was certainly what a part of her would have liked to do; she sensed that somewhere within her there was a woman weeping, or perhaps it was a terrified child, its heart already broken.

The next summer, a little over a year after Billie’s death, Eliza, perhaps reminded by the music on the record player, tried to describe the night on Fifty-second Street to her sister Daria Paulus, who was only a child that night when Billie sang.

“But
really?
You were there and saw Billie? Alive? How come you’ve never told me before?”

They were sitting in adjacent white wicker chairs, next to the suspended sofa, both facing the lake, so that from time to time either woman could look out to the water. Not confronted with each other, it was easier for them to talk.

Eliza said, “I thought I had.”

“Never. What was she like?” Daria then looked fully at her sister.

“She was beautiful, but it’s hard to remember. So many years ago, and I’ve spent so much time since thinking about her. Listening to her records.”

This conversation took place on a late summer afternoon, at one end of the long porch of a large gray-shingled house (Josephine’s—their mother’s—house); at the other end were a porte-cochère and a parking area.

Daria was thin and dark and delicate. Her long eyes varied from yellow to green to brown to gray; her hair was filmy, black-brown. And Eliza, at almost thirty, looked stronger; her
face had more definition than when she was simply a pretty girl. Fine lines had appeared in the corners of her eyes. But she could still be described as small and round. Both young women resembled their fathers: Caleb Hamilton, who, like Evan Quarles, committed suicide, after the stock market crash in 1929, before Eliza was born—a ghastly coincidence, whatever one chooses to call it, which has never been discussed as such between mother and daughter; and Jason Paulus, Daria’s father, referred to by Josephine (tactlessly, in Daria’s view) as “that Greek shit, but terribly good-looking.”

The two women sat tensely forward; they were smoking a lot and drinking iced tea. Below the porch, a flat, well-tended lawn stretched forward to a narrow white beach of rough sand—to the lake. Now the dark water was smooth, barely lapping at the shore, and in the green-white leaves of the clumps of birches there was hardly a stir. Later, in the cool, brisk fall, there would be brilliant, wind-torn days, when the lake was churned with waves into whitecaps, like a small and troubled sea, and the birches bent down with wind. But now the whole scene was quiescent, at peace, and the distant mountain peaks were obscured in a golden haze.

Daria was to be married the next day to the man named Smith Worthington; it was true what Red-Bill had told Eliza, in San Francisco, last summer. And the small family—Josephine and her two daughters, and Eliza’s daughter, Catherine—had assembled itself for the wedding.

Daria, still preoccupied with the fact of Eliza’s having actually
seen
Billie Holiday, asked her sister, “I wonder why the dog bit the man’s hand, her manager. Were they married, or was he her lover?” Billie’s beauty, and the dog and the bitten hand were the only details that Eliza had been able to remember, so far.

“I don’t know, at all,” Eliza answered, musingly. “Sometimes I wonder if I saw another man, somewhere else, with a dog on a leash and a bandaged hand. Maybe Billie came in late, all by herself. Of course that’s what I remember best. Her face.”

Then, having said all that, Eliza suddenly wondered
why
they were talking about Billie so much, or why at all, when tomorrow Daria was going to marry Smith, a promising young man, if a little colorless—in both respects a contrast to Daria’s usual friends (Eliza’s, too), who have been, in Josephine’s phrase, “more than a little odd”: shy, anxious, difficult boys, usually very poor. Why were they not talking about Smith, the wedding, their future as a couple?

Daria’s wedding was to be, romantically, in the orchard in back of the house. The orchard of gnarled apple trees, with their thick green leaves—a space crossed with low gray stone fences and bordered by dark woods of pine and fir and hemlock. Farther within those woods were huge boulders, dislodged in some ancient Ice Age, now submerged in roots and overgrown with underbrush, scattered with pine needles, almost camouflaged.