Pasadena (45 page)

But just as something almost imperceptible was shifting within Linda, a new sense of trust was taking shape within Bruder. He hungrily believed her, just as he recalled every detail of her body: the strong lines on the inside of her arms, her narrow, moon-white hips, the pink nipples upturned and greeting him, the flash of dark, dark hair between her thighs. He had been only with whores, and he never really looked at them, never wanted to look into their eyes, and with them his hands would find cool, hard flesh in the dark and he’d go about his business and finish up and always he’d say thank you. He was the type of man to pay in advance, so that the girl would know his word was good and his money real and so she could relax a little—if that was possible; Bruder didn’t fool himself about what the girl was thinking. But it was as if he had found an entirely different type of pleasure in Linda, and the short hours holding her had left him desperate for more. Nightly he reminded himself of the virtue of patience, and once or twice he thought that if he was to marry her, they could at last be together and Willis would have to let Bruder build a cabin at the far end of the grove, and there, together, they’d wait for fate to run its course. No matter what, Bruder remained committed to his belief in fate: they were meant to be together, and the time would come, and if he didn’t have this, what else would he have? He would say to her, “We’ll be together.”

And she would say, “I know.”

When there were moments to steal, they kissed, and rubbed the dusk-cold from their hands, and Bruder failed to taste the hesitation on her lip or feel it in her fingertips. When she asked about Rosa, why he was spending so much time with her, he failed to hear the skepticism in Linda’s voice. “How many times do I have to tell you? She’s my friend, and I’ve made a promise.”

When he said that she should be careful around Willis, Bruder was oblivious to her averted eye. He never saw the joy lifting Linda’s chin when Willis stopped by the ranch house. Bruder might have been suspicious of others, but not of her. “There’s nothing duplicitous about Linda,” he confessed to Rosa, who replied, in a distracted way, “I’m sure you’re right.”

One night, Bruder asked Linda to stay with him. “Let’s sit by the fire and watch the stars,” he said. “There are so many tonight.” And she agreed. “But let me go up and wash my face and change my dress.” He told her that she looked beautiful right then, and she said, “I’ve been working since five o’clock. Let me go and change.” And he tugged her hands and she slipped out of his grasp and ran up the hill.

In her room there was an oval mirror in a wooden stand, and in front of it she changed, and brushed down her hair, and tried a little of Rosa’s lipstick and clasped the coral pendant around her throat. The dress was old, but Esperanza had embroidered pink and yellow roses on the cuffs and the collar, and Linda unwrapped the stockings she had bought all those weeks ago, the silk now flimsy and dead-feeling in her hand. She wished she had a new dress and a new pair of stockings, but she didn’t; and she reminded herself of what Bruder was always saying about patience. He would say that it would bring both of them their true fate. She liked to challenge him: “But what if I’m meant for something else? Shouldn’t I hurry up and chase it? Grab it?” And she’d clutch his shirt and pull Bruder toward her, and if no one was around they would kiss. Once Hearts and Slay saw them in an embrace, and one of them said, “Uh-oh. Looks like trouble,” and the other laughed, and Linda and Bruder, holding on tight, each laughed into the sweet musk of the other’s hair.

Then there was a knock on her door. “Linda? Are you there? Lolly wants to know if you’ll come down and join us.”

Through the door she said, “I can’t tonight.”

“What can’t wait until morning?”

She thanked Willis and asked if she could join them another time, and he said, a bit impatiently, “Why not tonight?”

She said she needed to return to the kitchen. Willis promised there’d be music and he lowered his voice and said he had a good bottle of champagne on ice and Lolly wasn’t going to have any and wouldn’t it be a shame for him to have to drink it alone. “Linda? For a little bit?”

She hesitated, and the reflection in the mirror showed a beautiful girl dressed for an evening grander than a night by the ranch-house fire. “I can’t,” she tried again.

But then Willis was saying, “Do this for me?” He knocked impatiently on the door, and then the knob turned (when she’d first moved in, she’d noticed that there had once been a lock on the door but that it had been removed), and Willis was standing at the threshold. He was dressed in his dinner jacket, and his hair was tonicked down, and he was handsome and held a white-hearted rose in his palm. “For a few minutes?”

And Linda, who sometimes lost track of herself, agreed. “Just twenty minutes. Then I’ll have to go back to the ranch house.”

She stepped into the hall, and the music greeted her. They followed it, descending the stairs, passing the window with its view of the mountains; the lights from the observatory burned like low-hanging stars. On the loggia was a graphophone in a richly oiled wood box, its great petunia horn pumping jazz. Lolly was on a wicker swing reading the newspapers. Willis said, “May I get you some cider?” He winked and disappeared and, in a minute, returned with two brown mugs filled with champagne. Linda brought her mug to her lips and sipped; she coughed then, the bubbles tickling her throat, and it felt as if at once a bubble rose and popped in her head. Giddiness took her by the hand.

“Have you been ill, too?” asked Lolly. “That cough of yours?”

“Let’s get some real music going,” said Willis. He switched records, resetting the hummingbird needle. A rhythmic version of “Rumble, Tumble” began to play, and Willis kicked his feet a little and the champagne sloshed in his mug. His shoes were shiny, and his medal looked as if it too had been polished. He had gone to the barber recently, and the shell-pink scar was exposed and he mindlessly rubbed it with his handkerchief before wiping the spilled champagne from his thigh.

“Do you like to dance?” he asked Linda.

“Of course she likes to dance,” said Lolly. “What girl doesn’t?”

“You don’t, sister.”

“That’s different.” Lolly rolled her eyes and they turned in their sockets like two large, handblown marbles. It was as if she had said,
Men!
Or,
What will I ever do with him?
She pulled the
American Weekly
insert out of the
Star-News
and shook back the pages and burrowed into the stories with an
Oh goodness me
, like a sighing dog curling up for sleep. But soon she was emitting noises as she read the gossip:
Aha
and
Mmm-hmm
and
Uh-huh
and
Tsk-tsk
and a short, whiplike “I knew it.” Her commentary continued as she read along:

“That figures.”

“I saw it coming.”

And once, “I always knew she should’ve been more careful.”

“Anything good in the paper, sister?”

“Just the usual odds and ends,” she said, although her perusal of the society page was performed with an earnestness and exactitude that swelled beyond casual interest. On the days when she opened the newspaper and found neither herself nor Willis mentioned, she was both relieved and disappointed. “But the last place you want to end up is in Chatty Cherry’s column,” Lolly would say, pushing her face into the newsprint and clearing her throat and saying, more to herself than to anyone else, “Now let’s see what old Cherry’s dug up this time.”

She read the column while Willis fiddled with another disk, and Linda felt the champagne rise in her head. “Listen to this one,” said Lolly, who, Linda could see, managed to tap endless reserves of energy to make her way through the gossips. Lolly denied that she was
hooked
. “I only read Cherry’s column with any regularity. The others I just skim. Besides, the
American Weekly
recently gave her twice the space, so now she coughs up all sorts of useful news.” As if to prove that Chatty Cherry’s column was of greater merit than those pecked out by other society reporters, Lolly opened to it, cleared her throat, looked up to make sure Willis and Linda were listening, and began:

“Where is that reporter from?”

“Who, Cherry?” Lolly brought a ringed finger to her chin. “I don’t really know. She turned up only a few years back. But I don’t know anyone in town who doesn’t read her.”

“Have you met her?” asked Linda.

“Met Cherry? Of course not. You never want to meet Cherry. She’s a lurker. Hanging around a hibiscus shrub to get a story—that sort of business. No one wants to talk to her. No one answers her phone calls.”

“
Somebody
must talk to her,” said Willis. “
Somebody’s
feeding her the news.”

“The maids are, that’s who,” said Lolly. “It’s a problem for everyone. You’ve got to watch your gals.”

“Not ours,” said Willis.

“I wouldn’t trust that Rosa with my middle name.”

“Be kind, sister. Rosa’s a good girl, and you know it.”

“I’m sure she’s the one who spilled the news about my anemia.”

“Ah, sister, put the paper down and let’s dance.”

Willis pulled Lolly from the swing and she complained about her legs and protested that she really shouldn’t,
the doctor said …
Yet as soon as they began to two-step, her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together and she concentrated on the task of dancing around the loggia. The song had a long refrain—
Rollick frolic! Frisker whisker!
—and each time it came around Willis would plunge his sister so low in his arms that she’d become a board nearly horizontal above the floor and her hair would loosen from its knot and fill out like fruit swelling on the branch. Linda watched them, and she wondered what was the likelihood that her old pal Charlotte Moss had moved up the coast and reinvented herself as Chatty Cherry. It seemed unlikely that she could have attained such influence in four short years, but after all, weren’t transformations often seemingly completed overnight? You go to bed one person, and wake up as someone else. Wasn’t that the point? To shed the past like a layer of grime running down the drain?

When the record ended, Willis redeposited his sister in the swing. Lolly was flushed, and her chest rose and fell as she caught her breath, and she swabbed her throat with a piece of lace. Her eyes were pale and sensitive and trained on Willis.

“Now it’s your turn,” he said to Linda.

She moved to him, but Lolly said, “Oh, she doesn’t want to dance with you. She must think we’re so silly. She’s too grown-up for such horsing around.”

But Linda said that indeed she
did
want to dance, and soon Willis’s arms were around her and holding her close. His hand upon the small of her back made a subtle circling motion as he guided her around the loggia, and it was as if he had found a spot on her flesh she herself didn’t know: his strong fingers working the flesh beneath her cheap, thin dress. Willis hadn’t even noticed the embroidery, Linda realized; it was as if he had seen right through everything she wore, as if she might as well have worn nothing at all.

And Linda closed her eyes and imagined that it was Bruder holding her, leading her round the loggia. No, what she imagined in fact was
more complicated than that: she dreamed that Bruder was Captain Poore, that Captain Poore’s world was Bruder’s, and that she and Bruder could live like this, together and alone and comforted by the vastness of the ranch cradled in the valley. It was simple for her to envision, an entire world formed bright and green behind her eyelids, and it couldn’t have been further from reality, but there it was in Linda’s mind, every last detail of her desired world conceived.

The evening continued, but every time Linda said she had to be going, Willis would bring her a refilled mug and say, “One more dance.” Linda would refuse, but he’d pull her hand and she’d relent, and she wanted both to leave and to stay and her impulses were crossed and confused. Willis put on a new record and took turns dancing with Linda and Lolly. While he danced with Linda, Lolly would return to the gossip columns and she’d read the
especially good
items aloud, and her gleeful chuckle was as close to a cackle without being a cackle as was possible. And while Willis danced with his sister, Linda would lean against a pillar and listen to the breeze in the philodendron leaves and the trickle in the fountain. After almost an hour he said, “I’m worn out,” and he plopped onto the wicker sofa and lay on his back with his feet on the floor and he looked like a teenager slouched and drunk. Then he popped up and refilled his mug, and Linda’s as well, and Lolly said, “Maybe I’ll have a little cider after all.” But Willis was quick to say, “Sister, do you think you should? Didn’t the doctor say to count your sugar? Cider’s nothing but.”