Listening to Billie (23 page)

A bad series of thoughts; he knew that.

Then, one morning late in May, there was a sudden bright breakthrough of sunlight. Not really trusting it, Reed nevertheless pulled on his outdoor clothes, after feeding his new beautiful brown cats. He walked up the hill, up Nob Hill, to Huntington Park (to the corner where Daria first stood and thought of him with love). And he sensed instantly that he had made a mistake; he should not have come out. Everything was too bright for him: the brilliant shining Bay, the sleek cars rushing along Sacramento Street, the new green grass in the park. The blue sky hurt his eyes.

And then a familiar voice said, “Ah, Reed, how nice.”

Eliza Quarles sat on a bench, her face uplifted to the sun. She looked rested, smooth-skinned, her clothes all clean and bright. Jeans, a pink sweater. Reed remembered that she was five years older than he; today she looked at least that much younger.

He sat down beside her and they discussed the weather, Would it ever get warm? Would spring come this year?

Once a love affair was over, Reed rarely thought of the woman involved; he almost forgot her, except for an occasional bad hour, usually late at night, drunk or stoned, when a parade of past loves would float by, a procession of lovely nameless ghosts. Sometimes, when he had been in love with Daria, he would think of Eliza, enjoying the slight perversity of their sisterhood. Lately he had not thought much even of Daria,
having returned to his old pattern of much younger married girls, a few stray boys.

“I wrote to her because I thought her stuff was so terrific, and she turned out to be really nice,” Eliza was saying.

Eliza was talking about poetry, women writers. Her new friends.

And why? he thought. Why tell me? He was so desperately bored with everything; how could he possibly hear about “meaningful work,” or rewarding friends?

Eliza looked fully at him, and now Reed could see into her mind; she was thinking, How could I ever have loved this person, this completely vacuous man?

Deliberately he asked, “How’s Daria?”

“Oh, how funny, I’d forgotten you had met her. She’s fine—really well, I think.” Making it clear that she had also forgotten meeting him, at Daria’s house.

“Actually I met them both in Amsterdam, but it wasn’t until much later that we fell in love with each other.”

Eliza reddened and looked down, frowning. “In love? you and Daria?”

“Of course. For years. It just ended about a year and a half ago. She never told you?”

“No, of course not.” She compressed her mouth in order not to say: And why did you have to tell me?

But they had both felt that unspoken sentence; too late, Reed was sorry.

A few minutes later, they got up from their bench; they managed to separate with a few polite words, and walked off in opposite directions.

Heading down Mason Street, northward, toward the Bridge, Reed thought that now would be the time. He could simply keep on walking in that direction, in the bright new fresh air, the valuable sunlight: a jaunty stroller, a youngish man in
very good shape. (His teeth
looked
terrific.) There would be others walking on the bridge, couples, old people, tourists and joggers, and below would be the billowing white sails, blue waves. He would walk fast, smiling at everyone in a friendly recognition of such a rare day, its blessing. And then with a single gesture, a quick vault—off the bridge. Down, gone.

But how long is “down”?

And what about the cats?

He walked home, and in an hour or so it was raining again.

Some of Reed’s friends knew vaguely that he had a birthday early in the summer, but no one knew on just what day, or on which year he arrived at important milestones. He hadn’t talked about it, although the moment was on his mind: at 10:10 a.m. on June 4th, he would be forty years old.

And he did not know what to do about it. Give a party? Fly to New York (or Amsterdam) for the weekend with a terrific girl?

Jump off the bridge?

He was really too broke for gaudy trips or lavish parties (his business had been declining with a jarring speed; no one wanted to buy his expensive things); and besides, why should anyone know about his birthday? Instead, he invited a single friend, recently met, for dinner on the eve of his birthday, June 3rd: Alex Langlois, a nice and quite beautiful boy who was studying sculpture at the Art Institute.

He decided to make the dinner for two impressive. A little paté, a nice clear soup, crab curry with rice, a salad, a chocolate soufflé. Appropriate wines. The shopping for and preparation of all that fanciness would take up (would get him through) an entire day. A bad day: his last as a man in his thirties.

He enjoyed those hours, an entire afternoon of balmy sunshine. He shopped around in North Beach, on foot; he walked home and tidied up his house, and cooked, humming
show tunes from his early youth as he worked: “So in Love” (a favorite of his mother’s), “Wish You Were Here.”

The phone rang just as he was finishing up. He walked toward it thinking, Good, I have just time for a short friendly chat, a little gossip, with whoever. Shall I say that it’s my birthday?

“Hi, Ash?”

Ash? No one called him that. Stiffly he said hello.

“Ash, it’s Alex. Look, man, I’m really sorry, but this chick I used to know in L.A. has shown up, and I thought you wouldn’t mind. We could make it another night, okay? Well,
ciao.
”

Reed hung up. He had mumbled something polite, and then he was stricken, overwhelmed with a heavier desolation than he could have imagined possible. Too late, he understood how much he had counted on Alex, that trivial pretty boy, to get him through the evening. Of course he could have asked a more reliable friend: some nice woman. And even now, desperately, it occurred to him to call someone: Rosalyn, Marge, Julia, Bobbie, Patricia. Daria, Eliza—the ghosts filed past the edges of his mind.

But there he was with all that fancy and perishable food, chilled wines and delicate spring flowers on the table. Impossible to sit down to all that alone.

Slowly, fastidiously, he began to push food down the disposal.

As always, at that ugly gurgling sound, the cats bounded out of the kitchen. And, watching their graceful leaps, Reed understood that he had been given a sign.

Of course: tonight. He didn’t have to be forty at all, not ever. And at the phrasing of that thought he smiled twistedly. It was like a good joke that one couldn’t tell.

He sat at the wooden kitchen table, sipping soup. Once everything was tidy, he began to imagine the Bridge. An exhilarating walk there, in the cold windy dark. Perhaps he
could take a cab? Stupid to get mugged. A furtive climb over the barriers, an eluding run along the pedestrian walkway. The wet cold round steel railing.

Horrible
, all of it. Reed shuddered, and then he thought, How preposterous; why should I spend even my last five minutes so miserably? Why not stay at home, comfortably drinking vodka and popping Valium?

He got up, and moved quickly from liquor pantry to bathroom shelf; he got both bottles, which he took into the bedroom. There he poured himself a good drink, and opened the pills. Then, picking up a pen, he wrote a note to his mail-carrier, a nice, rather fat young woman, who had always admired and coveted his cats.

His was the last stop on her route.

He told her to take the cats, and to call the police.

Odd that it had taken him so long to work this out.

“Do you remember meeting a man named Reed Ashford at our house? Did you read in the paper that he died? He killed himself.”

Daria said those words rather factually over the telephone to Eliza; and Eliza, who had not yet read the paper that morning, or heard about Reed, began to tremble violently. She mumbled, “Yes, of course, I do remember him; that’s too bad—” And she hung up as soon as she could, as though she were fearful that Daria could see her sitting there shuddering.

And
why
? Why those tremors, the cold rush through her veins? The last time she saw Reed, that day in Huntington Park, she had thought, How could I have ever loved him? Her one-summer lover, her sister’s long-time love.

Or was he lying about Daria?

But Reed almost never lied; by nature he was a confessor, Eliza remembered. How, then, could Daria take it so calmly, with such apparent cool?

“Being in love with Reed wasn’t real to me,” Daria said, much later. “You know the way you sometimes feel at a party, looking around and wondering why you’re there? I felt like that with Reed, a lot of the time. As though ‘being in love’ was a place I had to go through, on the way to somewhere else.”

Which was not entirely unlike Eliza’s own experience of Reed.

But Reed’s death seemed to thrust Eliza back into a web of suicides. She thought first of the famous ones: Woolf, Plath. Marilyn, Billie. And then those frighteningly close to herself: her unknown father, Caleb Hamilton. Her husband, Evan Quarles.

And she was pursued by horrendously vivid moments of insight into some of those lives. She imagined Anne Sexton (in that instant she
was
Anne Sexton), back from lunch with a friend, thinking, perhaps tipsily, Well, why not now? Billie, shooting up in seedy hotels, with greedy, venal men. Marilyn, wild with anxiety, trying to phone someone, an important man, and not getting through; taking pills, losing count.

Evan, alone in his room in the old New England hotel, sleepless, thinking, I am queer. Drinking bourbon, taking pills.

Reed, growing old and less beautiful.

And she felt those people’s sorrow, their despair; it poured through her veins like some dark dye, staining her blood and thickening in her heart. Their blind deathward surge became her own.

Suicide had caught up with her. Death.

Impossible to work. What she felt was all black and destructive.

Did that mean that she should—that she would die? It was not grief for Reed that she felt; it was sheer fear of death, her own private terror of suicide.

The weather of that summer was as unbearable as the contents of Eliza’s mind, and at times she was unable to tell the difference between the long cold dark windy days, and the cold dark interior corridors of her brain. Still, she forced herself out into the weather. Every day she walked for at least a couple of hours: through the narrow packed streets and the good food
smells of Chinatown, the elegant spaces of Nob Hill, Huntington Park (not knowing where Reed’s house was, how near); sometimes out Union Street to a favorite bookstore; once into the Presidio, through those woods of wind-bent cypress, eucalyptus. In the cold, the heavy fog.

She talked to a relatively new friend, Jane, a novelist: one of the women writers whom Eliza had mentioned to Reed. Tall and lean, prematurely gray, with intense dark brown eyes, Jane had published three (good) novels and was struggling through a fourth. Eliza felt Jane to be almost her own opposite: Jane was more practical, more sensible, more
intelligent
than she was. Jane was not small and round. Jane had tall good-looking sons—twin sons—a talented and successful architect husband. Jane’s life looked enviably stable, so that at times Eliza wondered, Should I have married someone (Harry?) and had more children? Should I perhaps be writing novels, not poetry?

To that last question, uttered by Eliza, Jane said, “Well, no. Maybe, but probably not.” And then she laughed, still eying Eliza speculatively: “What I mean is you probably would have thought of a novel before, if that’s what you wanted.”

Eliza sighed. “No, you’re right. I’m just tired of poetry. Everyone’s, but especially mine.”

Jane looked at her kindly, inquisitively. “Sometimes when I feel worst something good comes up out of it, some good work,” she said. “A sort of phoenix syndrome. But you can’t predict it.”

“Everything seems to be lurching downward. Death-ward,” Eliza said.

Jane mused, “I think suicides scare everyone. Writers especially; so many of us have done it, after all.”

After that conversation Eliza was somewhat less low, less preoccupied with darkness. She and Jane were not opposites,
after all; they were both writers. And they had chosen each other as friends out of shared concern for that work. The friendship was not simply circumstantial, as several of Eliza’s had been before—Peggy Kennerlie, the same college; Kathleen, an office friend—and as so many women’s friendships often seemed to be.

In a morbid way, at night, she had been listening to Billie again: the most mournful, terrible songs, the dirges. “Strange Fruit,” “Gloomy Sunday.”

Now, with an effort, Eliza stopped doing that; she purposefully played Handel and Haydn, Mozart, Boccherini. And for variety she played old Beatle records, the silly cheerful ones from ten years back, when they only cared about being rich and famous and turning on with gorgeous birds.

At that time, midsummer, Smith and Daria were still in Maine with Josephine. Eliza had been getting curious letters from them all: letters about the strangely cold wet summer. (Something terrible is happening all over the world, Eliza thought.) Nothing about what any of them were really doing; specifically, why Daria and Smith were still there.

It was not for the sake of Josephine’s health; everyone, even David, her kindly agent and friend, had written to Eliza that Josephine was fine, was very slightly weaker but still vigorous and alert. She swam when the days were warm enough; she went for long walks. She was writing.

And Daria said that Smith was well; he was not depressed any more.

Smith wrote that Daria had never seemed happier, or looked prettier. You dope, Eliza thought. Daria is not pretty; she’s beautiful.

Aside from assessing each other’s mental and physical well-being, what were they doing there?

Eliza had a sense that perhaps some precarious balance had
been struck between them all, and it occurred to her, of course, to go to see them. Christ, to see Maine! But she was prevented by a further sense that she would somehow throw them off; she would be the catalyst of change, of a new imbalance.