The View from Here (20 page)

I reached over and laid a hand on hers on the small table, amongst the tinkly array of coffee-shop paraphernalia.

“It won't be perfect, Chloe. No marriage can ever be perfect because no two people are perfect. You just have to do your best and hope that you choose someone who will do theirs. There isn't a magic formula or a magic time. You have to decide if this is what you want and what Ed wants and then you just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I wish I could give you something better, some sort of universal golden rule, but I can't.”

She didn't reply for a moment, just watched me, and then she said, “You like Ed, don't you?”

“Yes,” I said. It was true. I liked Ed very much. “And Ed might make a wonderful husband, but I don't want you to marry because of me.”

She understood what I meant, and did not hedge it, though she avoided direct reference to the obvious—that I would not be around to meet the next man she fell in love with.

“I know, and I don't think it would be because of you exactly, but I do like that he knows you. And you know him.”

I squeezed her hand and she turned it palm upward to mine.

“I like that too,” I said.

Ed came to the party, of course, and played the young man about the place in a very charming way, refreshing ladies' drinks, dancing with Catherine and Sonia, being helpful to Phillip and attentive to me, like a son-in-law in the making. And why not? He is thirty-one, after all, and well educated and steadily employed. Why shouldn't he marry? And why wouldn't he want Chloe for his bride? Darling Chloe, wondrously lovely that night in a delicate dress that defied the season.

I won't detail who else came because the names as a body carry meaning only for me, but there were seventy-two affirmative RSVPs and seventy-two of those came. Plus one more.

It was all just as I imagined it would be, just as I had planned: musicians in the conservatory, barmen serving champagne, pleasant women circulating with silver trays full of all the delicious things that Catherine had recommended. The furniture had been rearranged so that there was a natural passage between rooms and enough places for people to stand and to sit, and in the kitchen there was pheasant casserole and mashed potatoes to be served at ten thirty. I felt, as it all began, and the liquor oiled the voices and the music struck up, not happy, because that can convey an element of deliriousness, more like content. I felt that everything was in its place.

We had had parties before of course, and I thought of many of them that night and in the weeks leading up to it. Parties and dinners and whole weekends full of guests that had left us with a litter of partially empty glasses and overflowing ashtrays and new sets of inexplicable marks on the carpet. We had sat in that sort of debris often enough, Phillip and I, dissecting an evening's events, the talk, the jokes, the arguments, and more than once in those talks, from that safe distance, we had analyzed the state of other people's marriages.

Had other people been analyzing ours? Were there signs? Perhaps there had been a turning point that I'd missed during the years when the parties grew smaller, when the same faces always appeared at them, and the same jokes and arguments reared. The years when Phillip and I no longer automatically took the opportunity to make love in the mornings afterward before we fetched Chloe from Emily's or Joan's. Perhaps it was then that whatever had seemed to me so robust had begun to crumble.

People had started to dance, and the noise had risen to that bubbly level that signals the true beginning of a party when Chloe wandered past me and smiled and kissed my cheek, and I thought, if there were signs, she did not see them, does not still. And then watching her walk away again, back into the thickness of the crowd, and seeing her settle on the arm of a chair that Ed was sitting in, I felt very deeply that all my losses were bound up in her. In the beginning I had thought often of things that I wished I had done, places I had not seen, experiences I had missed and would never have, but Chloe was the only thing now that represented an unfulfilled future to me. Chloe was all.

Catherine, my protector, perhaps concerned by my dreamlike state, took my arm and asked quietly if I was all right. I did not reply, because through the double arch that leads from the room where I was standing to the one that opens onto the front hallway, I saw Josee.

NINE

T
HERE WERE TWO
or three days then that were the last days. The end of things, though I didn't know it at the time. Still, looking back, that's how they seemed. A little autumnal despite the heat. I remember that we ate cold soup one night, thick and creamy green as Patsy's eye shadow, and that the children organized a relay race around the perimeter of the house, using rolled-up magazines for batons. But what I remember most is the shift in the players. Sally, who had until then, apart from her one stab of girlishness the day of the moonlight picnic, been more or less a background figure, at least as far as I was concerned, was now firmly established at the center of everything.

Christina was fashioning a protection cover, with plastic wrap and tape, for Sally's bandage.

“Does it hurt, Mommy?” Jessica asked.

“A little.”

Christina tsked, tender in her ministrations. Sally acknowledged her concern with a small smile.

“Is it smashed?” Howie enthused.

“No, dear.” Patsy's voice came unexpectedly, lightly from the glass doors. “Nothing so serious as that.”

When the bandage was covered, Christina tucked in the neat ends of tape.

“Couldn't you just take it off?” Patsy suggested dryly. “It isn't as if it's really
doing
anything, is it?”

Sally slipped her arm into the gold-patterned silk scarf that Christina was tying at her neck, like a sling.

“Thank you, Christina,” she said, smiling. Then, gingerly nestling her damaged wrist into its stylish cradle, she said to Patsy, “I think it's best to keep it on,” as if there had been no interval between question and reply.

“You'd think she was really hurt, wouldn't you?” Patsy said to me in a low voice later. Sally had persevered all day with a fragile-eyed weariness, gasping stagily at one point when Howie had bounced a ball too near to where she was sitting on a carefully arranged beach mat. Now Christina would not quit her fussing. I was beginning to find the whole business irksome, not least because Mason, despite the hospital's assurance regarding the minor nature of Sally's injury, remained extremely attentive to his wife.

I watched, horrified, as he lifted a candied cherry from a drink and held it to her lips. I turned my eyes decisively back to Patsy, and giggled, pleased, when she took the cherry from her own drink and sucked at it with an exaggerated pout.

If Mason became rather attentive to his wife, he offset this behavior with his pronounced ardor toward me. He was, by then, exceptionally opportunistic. He cornered me in hallways, shadows, and once, determinedly, in a downstairs bathroom. These bold exertions lit in me a shivery state of constant desire. I was, like any addict, hostage to it.

That morning he whisked an orange juice from my hand and swept me, with a flexed arm, into the brief seclusion offered by the corner of the house. There he leaned me against the Buick's sun-warmed bonnet and pressed his hips to mine. I kissed him, my hands on his face, enveloped by my own emotions and the peaceful tremble of insect song.

A little later, Patsy and Richard and I were settled on the patio when Mason, host again, nobody's frenzied lover, came to the door and asked mildly if we'd seen Sally. The name might have passed over me, so much feathery nothingness, had I not noticed, behind him, Christina's dark eyes, stirred with alarm.

“I took the tray, sir,” she said.

“And she's not in the bath?” Mason asked.

“No, sir. I am worried,” Christina replied.

Mason spoke placatingly, “I'm sure we'll find her.”

“She always waits for me to come with the tray, sir,” Christina insisted as he followed her into the house. “
Always.
”

I watched them go. The contrasting dark of the indoors swallowed them.

“Looks like Mrs. Severance has got another little show planned,” Patsy said.

I hoped not. I had to leave soon for the makeup lesson with Letty and I wanted Mason to come with me. But Sally wasn't in the house. The search gathered momentum. The children's rooms were checked. Bee Bee and Ned's door was knocked on. Maids were enlisted. Mason reappeared at the glass doors with Ned, fastening the tie of his polka dot dressing gown, behind him.

“She must have gone for a walk,” Ned said.

“
Sally?
” Mason answered.

Ned shrugged.

“Sally is not the go-for-a-walk type,” Mason went on. His voice, I realized with a lurch of disappointment, had suddenly taken on the same feeble taint it had had at the hospital. “Anyway,” he continued, “her arm.”

“It's bruised, sprained at best,” Patsy said. She was wearing a full-skirted yellow dress. It suited her. Her appearance, together with the shiny jut of her lower lip as she tipped the last of her orange juice to it, added a tinge of bright offhandedness to her comment.

“Are both cars there?” Richard asked sensibly.

Ned went to check. I already knew.

“Yes,” Ned confirmed, returning.

“Anyway,” Mason said, looking at Patsy, “she certainly wouldn't be able to drive with that arm.”

Patsy, holding his gaze in the sunshine, replied, “Oh, I'd say she could do whatever she wanted, when she wanted, that wife of yours.”

I had never seen Mason angry before, but he was angry then.

“Back off, Patsy. Just back right off!” His face, leaning close to hers, was livid.

I stared. Patsy's cocky expression dissolved. She was shaken; she looked, momentarily, as if she might cry. Richard, next to me, was on his feet and Ned took a step forward.

I got up too. “If she
has
walked, she'll have gone down the hill to the beach,” I said, the words coming fast and stern. I was trying to take hold of the situation, to restore some sort of normal boundaries. Mason was frightening me.

“I suppose she could have,” he said, grasping at this, spinning his attention from Patsy to me.

“Yes.” I was relieved. For a steady half second I thought the matter was concluded. I thought Mason would relax again, apologize to Patsy, calm down, and drive me into town.

Mason nodded once and headed hurriedly for the gate that led to the beach path. It swung shut behind him with a bang. We all watched. The latch didn't quite engage and the gate rebounded and clacked again. Patsy, across from me, was still clearly shaken by his outburst.

“Everyone's been thrown off by that accident,” Ned said in a pacifying tone.

“Yes,” Richard agreed, getting up, offering to fetch fresh coffee.

When he had gone, I turned to Patsy and said, “He didn't mean it,” meaning Mason.

She knew who I meant.

“Oh,
you
don't think so?” she replied.

Taken aback, I picked up a fork from an unused plate setting and began to toy with the prongs.

“Sorry,” she said then.

I put the fork down and smiled. “Forget it.” We were becoming very good friends.

Richard came back with the coffee. Patsy poured some and asked, “Are you going into town, Frankie?”

“Yes, I have a lesson at eleven thirty.”

She fingered the crocodile strap on her slim wrist, checking her watch. “I'll take you if you like.”

I hesitated.

“That's a good idea,” Richard encouraged. “You girls have a run into town. Pick me up something fresh to read.” He dropped his paper, with a little flap, onto the ground beside him.

“I need to get my things,” I answered. I was thinking, I'll take my time, give Mason a chance to get back.

From my room I watched the corner where the gate was, expecting him. He didn't come. I looked at my little clock. I would have to go.

“Let's take the Buick,” Patsy suggested.

“I thought you liked driving the jeep.”

“Just for a change.” The keys were dangling from her fingers.

During the drive in she was quiet. She smiled when I told her what Bee Bee had said about Cactus Roy's hat, but she didn't seem to think it very funny. Then she asked, “What do you make of her? Bee Bee?”

Her tone made me wary. “You know her better than I do.”

“Not that much better,” she answered. “We're all the same, you know, social set I guess you'd call it. We meet at parties and things.”

I was surprised. I had assumed that they were all closer than that. That perhaps they had all been away together before.

“I think they're both pretty…tough,” she said thoughtfully after a while, “Bee Bee and Sally. Same mold.”

Patsy dropped me off and I told her I'd walk down to the square to meet her an hour or so later. “We can have lunch,” she suggested.

“Don't you think they'll be expecting us?” I said. I had it in mind to hurry back in case Mason, fretful as I was at the lost opportunity, had conjured some new plan.

“I don't care if they are,” Patsy replied.

And I decided, watching her put her dark glasses on, not to argue. Recently there had been a hint of hysteria about her.

“What is a slut?” Letty asked at the end of the lesson.

I stared. “Where did you hear that word?”

“I read it,” she said. “In a book.”

She was such an innocent-looking girl, fawnlike, hopeful.

“Show me the book.”

It was an American paperback. I recognized it. There had been several copies in the store on the square the previous week. I tried not to smile. I had recommended to Letty that she try to read some English-language books.

“In Spanish,” I told her, “there are some words that are not…polite.” She nodded, earnest. “This is an English word like that. This book”—I lifted it—“is full of words like that.” Letty blushed, pink under the gold of her skin. “I think perhaps I'll take this book and find you a better one.”

“Thank you, Frances,” she said, dropping her eyes.

I told this story to Patsy over lunch. I hoped she would laugh, and she did, but with no heart.

“Funny things,” she said, “words. You say them and other people say them, but half the time you mean different things.”

We were drinking beer. I sipped mine. She was fingering her bottle.

“A couple of days ago,” she said, “I told Richard that I loved him.”

I didn't think she expected me to answer. “It meant nothing,” she continued, “not to me anyway. It was just one of those things you say sometimes before you realize it, because you've said them before. Habit, I guess. I don't know. It's all such a mess.”

I understood what she meant, but noted more the bonedeep unhappiness that weighted her words.

On the way home she hit the horn hard two hundred yards before the trash dump and revved the engine. The usual gang of children cleared the road. Then, with the coast clear, she jerked the car violently to the left. The hood missed the pole that Sally had hit by inches. On the ground, tiny shreds of glass glinted in the sunlight, remnants from that earlier encounter. I had been thrown forward, but I hadn't hit the dash. Patsy lurched back into her seat.

“Patsy.”
My heart was thumping. “What are you doing?”

She didn't reply. She knew that I knew what she was doing.

People had come out to look. People who had been bent, scavenging on the trash heap, righted themselves, and the children were shouting. One of them called out “Locos” and shook his head.

Patsy did look a little crazy.

The boy who I thought of as Jessica's boy was on his perch on the steps of one of the shambly houses, surrounded as usual with bright flowers. As I caught my breath he put his hand up and waved.

Patsy reversed the car sharply and took off at speed. At Jailhouse Rock she said, “She did it on purpose.” Then, with horrible deliberation, she banged her wrist against the steering wheel. After a pause, during which we both watched the weal rise red and angry on her skin, she said, “Calculating bitch,” and laughed too loudly. I began to feel concerned for her.

Sally was out by the pool with a cushion under her elbow when we returned. Her forearm lay across it like an offering. She smiled as we came around the corner.

“I assume you've eaten,” she said. “We've just finished, but Christina will fix you something if not.”

Mason, reading at Sally's side, looked up calmly and smiled too.

Patsy stared. I feared a scene. She would come off the worse.

“We had something in town,” I said. “Thank you.”

Paige, dripping, just out of the pool, flapped a little hello. I sent one back. The other children were busy with a ball and a floating hoop. The pool water heaved and splashed; puddles glistened on the patio tiles.

“Where were you this morning?” Patsy asked Sally pointedly.

Sally adjusted her sunglasses. “Oh, I just took it into my head to walk to the beach. I don't know why. I gather I caused a bit of a flap.”

Bee Bee, who I'd assumed was asleep, lying on a halfshaded lounger nearby, said huskily, “I wasn't worried.”

Sally smiled.

“Neither was I,” Patsy added. “You can look after yourself, can't you, Sally?”

“Most of the time,” Sally replied, looking at her.

Inside, helping herself to wine at the sideboard, Patsy said to me, “Don't say anything, Frankie.”

I took the glass she held out.

“About the accident,” she said, glancing swiftly outdoors toward the others.

“All right,” I agreed. I hadn't planned to. I thought her theory absurd.

Throughout the rest of the day and the evening Mason's manner toward me was not cold, worse, the opposite, too friendly. At dinner he grinned and offered to fill my glass, waving the bottle cheerily, as if I were some newly introduced acquaintance at a Christmas party. So it was a surprise to wake later in bed to his weight on top of me. He made love to me with a fierce urgency that left me with rose-petal bruises. Afterward, his breath steadying, he curled against me, suddenly fetal, his head on my chest.