The View from Here (22 page)

There were twin beds in the room. The sun had faded their bedspreads in patches over the years; if you lifted the pillows there would be darker spots where the cloth had been covered. I sat on the end of one of the beds, and Josee lowered herself onto a chair near the dressing table. She sat right on the edge, perched for flight.

“There was a time, Josee, when I felt very angry toward you, violently so. And I cannot say that has completely evaporated. You are…perhaps not the cause, but a central element in a situation which has brought a great deal of pain into this house.”

I knew then that she felt shame. It burned at the base of her neck, started a little flush that crept to her jawline. I realized that I had no sincere desire to prolong it.

“But now I am more concerned about the future,” I said. I don't know if she relaxed, but she was attentive at least. “Chloe,” I went on, and then held still for a moment because tears threatened. I looked down, determinedly focused on the gray lap of my dress, on my own knees, not willing to lose control, not willing to give her that. “Chloe,” I said again, firmly, “is Phillip's child. She is the most important thing in his life.”

“Well, yes,” she said, as if she understood this. But I don't think she did really. It is the kind of thing people pay lip service to.

“I realize that she is an adult now and that you are not much more than ten years older than her. I am not suggesting that she needs a mother. I don't really want her to have another mother, and, anyway, the woman who gave birth to her is downstairs.” She was, dancing with some friend of Ed's, her skinny rear clamped in a pair of black satin trousers. “But if you are going to marry Phillip, you have to care for Chloe, and you have to allow Phillip to love her.”

I'm not sure if she had really thought about marrying Phillip before. I guessed that she had, but in that shimmery, mirage sort of way that women are prone to, not the brasstacks practical way that includes mortgages, and sick kids, and no hot water. Not in the way that marriage actually demands. And maybe she thought about it again then in that new light while I was thinking, with the harder part of me, could I have done it? Could I have let a man love an adult child, a fully formed adult child, rather than the embryonic little being that Chloe had been and that I had been able to influence, to cleave to so? How often had we been the team, Chloe and I?
Silly Daddy.

“I don't really know Chloe,” Josee said.

I was brought back then, struck by the “really.” Struck hard. I stared at her for a second with the air sucked out of me, imagining that she and Chloe had been introduced. That Chloe was already involved at a level I had not and did not wish to contemplate.

She seemed to read this.

“I only met her that one time when you came to the office. She was with you.”

She had been. I remembered. Chloe had liked Josee's skirt, had commented on it. They were almost contemporaries, after all.

“I am sorry, Frances,” Josee said. She had needed to say it. I suppose it made her feel better.

When we went back down to the party, Phillip was of course watching for us, and this time he did look at her, at Josee, though only briefly, cautiously. Perhaps, I thought, she is a little diminished in his eyes in this setting, but that thinking was probably wishful and certainly worthless. I dismissed it.

Chloe, seeing us too, came toward me, a little puzzled.

“I was looking for you,” she said.

“Well, here I am. Get me a drink of water, would you, darling?”

“Sure,” she said, turning to go, and then, casually, she nodded to Josee. “Oh, hello.”

Phillip was still watching but had not approached, and Josee, making his decision for him for the second time that evening, said, “Goodbye, Frances,” and turned on a smart heel and left before he could.

TEN

I
N THE RATHER
grand room where we had entertained Maria and Arturo and where tonight, on account of the inclement weather, we had retired for coffee, Patsy wandered around restlessly, drumming her fingers on the mantel, against the backs of chairs.

“Patsy, do sit down,” Sally said.

Patsy stiffened, straightened, and looked hard at Sally. “Sit down?” she repeated.

“Please,” Sally replied. “There's enough irritation with the wind.”

Richard, who had been making a futile attempt to stem a persistent rattle in the French doors with the torn-off back cover of a matchbook, opened them briefly and closed them again with a slam. The wind squealed and faded behind the glass.

“Can't fix it,” he said absently, abandoning the matchbook cover and giving the door handles a last pointless tug before returning to his chair. Passing Sally, he bumped the edge of an inlaid occasional table that had been moved to accommodate somebody's drink, and, stepping back from it, gave her elbow a slight jog. She winced.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, turning clumsily. “I'm sorry…I—”

Sally raised her hand. “It's fine.” She frowned again, though, as she touched her fingers lovingly to the affronted arm. She had, at last, quit her sling, but she continued to wear the wrist wrapped, like something precious. Tonight it was swathed in moss green silk.

“Hermès, no less,” Bee Bee had remarked earlier, laughing.

Mason crossed the room and knelt at Sally's side. “All right, sweet?” he asked.

I recognized the lidded quality that alcohol gave his eyes. I had always rather liked it before. But suddenly, looking at him looking at his wife, his mouth slightly ajar with the tipped-up angle of his face, his expression just seemed weak, beseeching.

Sally nodded, and closed her hand over his for a long, painful second.

Patsy, toward whom I averted my gaze, had drunk a great deal at dinner. I noticed that her cheeks were flushed and her eyes almost feverish. I was worried about her before she laughed, but then, when she did, it was terrible.

“Don't you see?” she said in a tight voice as the awful, jeering sound died. “Don't you see what she's doing?”

“Patsy.” Richard's voice was too surprised to carry any authority.

Patsy ignored it. “The whole
accident
. The nonsense with the hurt arm. She faked it.”

“Patsy!” Richard said again.

“It's a trick,” his wife screamed over him. “One of her endless scheming tricks to keep her husband where she wants him.”

Shock settled, clammy, about the room.

“Well, they don't work,” Patsy went on, weighting each syllable and leaning toward Sally. “He still looks elsewhere.”

I froze.

“Your wife is drunk,” Sally said coldly, calmly, to Richard.

Richard, looking apologetic, stood and took two steps toward Patsy, but she held up her palm, warning him off. Suddenly her face, which had been malicious, melted, and the other, girlish Patsy emerged. With her arm still extended, she turned her gaze to Mason, who was, by then, on his feet, staring at her.

“It's because she guessed about us,” Patsy said to him feebly. “She wanted to get your attention, because she guessed about us.”

My head shot from Patsy to Mason and back again. Then the words began to creep through my veins, and as they did, I knew that what I was feeling was not horror at some unimagined revelation, but dread sickness at the confirmation of something already long suspected. And determinedly rejected. I looked again at Mason, who did not look at me, and pictured Patsy and him embracing by the pool in the moonlight.

Mason began to say something but was cut off abruptly by Sally.

“Us?” she asked Patsy, in a tone of disdainful indifference.

Patsy lowered her arm and turned quickly to Richard, who had remained frozen an arm's length from her. “I am sorry,” she said, looking at him, tears coming to her eyes. “I know that I shouldn't tell you this way, but, in the end, what difference will it make? I want a divorce.” And then, half to Sally, she said, “Mason and I are in love.” She exhaled, as if the making of this announcement had afforded her great relief. She closed her eyes for a second and then opened them again. Freed.

“But Patsy,” I heard Sally's dry voice say, distant through the thoughts that were rioting in my head, “Mason is having an affair with Frankie.”

I was sure that someone laughed. I felt myself panicking, but I sat nevertheless, absolutely motionless.

“Well, not an affair exactly,” Sally went on. “More of a fling. A vacation fling, I suppose.”

No one seemed yet to have caught the pace. Patsy was watching Sally, and everyone else was watching Patsy.

Sally continued in a savage tone of false sympathy, “So you see, don't you, dear, that my husband's commitment to you might not be such that you'd want to break up your happy home for it.”

Patsy let out a short inhuman howl and launched herself at me. Ned, swift to his feet, intervened and caught her by the shoulders. I leapt up too, some instinct for self-protection finally sparking my legs into motion. We stood, staring at each other, Patsy and I, with Ned between us, both trembling, both breathing hard.

Patsy twisted her head to Mason. “You swore,” she screamed. “You absolutely
swore
. You said she was nothing.”

I realized she was talking about me. I was the “she.” The nothing. She heaved an arm loose from Ned and extracted from the side pocket of her black evening trousers a crumpled sheet of buff paper. I recognized the paper. For an addled second I thought it was Mason's note to me. Patsy, a look of intense concentration on her face, was unfolding it. Her hands were shaking. “Darling girl…” she said feebly. Then a sob took her voice.

It was not Mason's note to me. It was a note from Mason to Patsy. She was going to read it. She inhaled with a shiver, pushed her shoulders back, and held the thing at her chest like a schoolgirl about to begin a recitation. “Darling girl,” she repeated in a presentation voice.

Sally interrupted. “You
really
didn't know?”

Patsy's determination wavered. The hand with the note in it drooped.

“I thought
everybody
knew.” Sally swiveled toward us, and we, involuntarily, all turned to her, the star performer. She crossed her legs. “Bee Bee knew, didn't you, Bee Bee?”

Patsy spun her head to Bee Bee, confusion blurring her features, her mouth hanging slack.

“If you can't stand the heat…” Bee Bee said quietly. She lifted her drink and sipped it.

Sally's voice, clear and even, picked up again. “Oh, I can imagine that Frankie didn't realize about
you
. She's such a little innocent, aren't you, Frankie? Except when it comes to other people's husbands.”

The prick of this brought me back sharply to real time. I snapped my eyes to Mason, who, it dawned on me, incredibly, had said nothing. Nothing at all since the beginning of this murderous stampede. He was staring steadily down at his wife.

“Sally,” he said at last.

“You see,” she went on as if he hadn't spoken, “Mason is a marvelous husband but for this one tiny fault. He simply cannot resist a pretty face.” She was reveling. Mason shut his eyes tightly, as though in physical pain. “Like Maisy O'Dea's. You know Maisy, I think, Patsy. She played tennis with the same group as you last summer at the club.
She
had a pretty face, although I always thought her nose rather prominent.”

“Sally,” Mason said again. His tone had gathered some insistence, but he still could not gain a real hold on the situation.

“And Dolly Matheson's,” Sally sang. “You might have come across her once or twice. She and her husband are often at the Jeffreys' parties.”

“Sally!” Mason commanded, without looking at her. He wheeled his eyes instead, wide and cold, around the room. They caught mine for a flat second, and I did not recognize them. “This is ridiculous,” he went on quietly, turning to face his wife, reasoning with her.

Sally, though, seeming to sense the imminent collapse of her moment, raced ahead. “There was Caroline Milford too, of course, Senator Milford's daughter, but she's graduated now, I believe, and moved to California or somewhere.”

A sound, rage, exploded from Mason. Scowling heavily, he raised both his hands and strode out of the room.

Patsy shrieked his name, but he did not look back.

“I think you should go to bed, Frankie.”

I heard the words, but for an instant did not relate them to myself.

“Go to bed, Frankie.” It was Ned who had spoken, in a voice devoid of affection.

Patsy broke free of Ned's grip and rushed after Mason. We all watched the door swing in her wake. Nobody moved to follow her. Sally revolved her head slowly to face me. “Yes, Frankie. Go to bed.”

I looked at her.

“We've finished with you,” she said.

I nodded, but continued to stand there, wanting, wishing for someone to come and put an arm around me. Eventually I turned, as if through molasses, to go. I was afraid that my legs would not hold me as far as the door. Just then Mason came back through it.

“I'm sorry to have to ask you this, Richard,” he said, “but do you think you could persuade Patsy to go to bed? She's in our room.”

Richard lifted his chin and looked at Mason. “She can rot there,” he said expressionlessly. “You can both rot there.” He went out through the French doors.

A moment later I heard the wooden gate bang. That's when I realized that the wind had dropped.

“Good night, Frankie,” Sally said firmly.

Mason sat back down in a wingback chair, sighing and dropping his hands over the sides.

Leaving, I could not feel my limbs.

I went to my room and sat on the bed. I lowered my head to let the tears come, but they would not. I felt instead a rush of shivery desperation. Desperation to speak to Mason. I wanted to shout at him and beat on his chest with my fists until he had explained everything to me. And begged my forgiveness. And made it all go away.

As I stared at the floor beyond my knees, the idea began to form in my head that he would want to talk to me too. That he would come to my room, just as soon as he could, so I got up and fixed my hair a little. Then I waited at the dressing table, moving my hairbrush about absently and busying my mind practicing the things that I would say to him.

After a while I got up and looked down at the familiar, night-lit view from my window. I could not imagine what I would do if I had to face the morning without having spoken to him first.

I opened my door and closed it softly behind me. In the hallway I stood and listened to the silence and my own heartbeat for a breathless moment. Then I took my shoes off and began to walk.

When I got to the drinks room, I held still briefly before going in. It was dark. I made my way past the familiar shadowy shapes of the daybed, and the big sideboard, and the wicker chairs, and I opened the glass doors and went outside. The air was very still. I moved, with precise thief's steps, along the wall toward the long drift of yellow light spilling from that other room, the room where we all had been. The room where they still were. I heard voices: Mason's, Bee Bee's.

I shut my eyes, concentrating, but I could not make out what they were saying. All the windows had been sealed earlier because of the wind. I edged nearer, my hands flat against the cool of the stucco. Mason had just begun to speak again when another voice, at my back, startled me so much that I screamed. It was Christina. She was sitting, spectreish in her black dress, on one of the slatted outdoor chairs. “Good evening,” she said. That was all.

Then she stood up slowly, her eyes on mine, as, behind me, the French doors rattled and opened. I turned and ran as fast as I could, my bare feet skimming the ground. I slammed the door of my room shut and leaned against it, panting, for several minutes. Waiting. For phantoms. No footsteps echoed in my wake. No commanding knock sounded. Nobody had followed me. I felt, at the realization of this, utterly, ridiculously abandoned. Eventually I peeled myself from the door and lifted the clock from my bureau. I stared at it for a moment. After three.

In the morning I heard him swimming. It was a sound that I had listened for, half-conscious, many times. My ears were practiced at alerting me to it. I woke and could not believe at first that he would be doing anything so ordinary. Swimming. Then, filled with an absolute and driving resolve to confront him, I got up and rushed down to the pool.

Christina, holding a coffeepot, stood blocking my way for a second at the patio doors, but I was too demented with mission and lack of sleep to be put off. I pushed her aside and stepped past.

Mason lifted his wet head and took me in, my unkempt hair and my slept-in dress. He crawled evenly to the pool edge, hauled himself from the water, and picked up a towel. He gave Christina a nod that sent her away, although she turned a last reluctant glance in my direction from the door. Beginning to dry himself, he looked at me as a stranger might have.

“Mason?” My voice broke.

He sighed and rubbed roughly at his head. “I did warn you.”

I stared, uncomprehending.

“I
told
you. Not to try to understand everything.”

I felt like a child. A child who has touched something hot when it is old enough to know better. I tried to speak but couldn't.

Mason's hand on his head left off rubbing. He lowered the towel, his hair still damp and boyishly messy. Something in him softened. The set of his arms relaxed. The towel trailed on the ground. I thought, for one raw moment, that the conversation would begin, at last, take the begging coaxing turn I had anticipated.

“Listen, Frankie,” he said, sighing a little, “you've had an affair with a married man. You
would
have had an affair with a married man whether I'd come along or not. You're the type, the explorer type. In the end you'll probably just chalk me up to another one of your gypsy adventures.” He smiled then, quite cheerfully.