The View from Here (24 page)

At some point we stood, the five of us, as if on command, and left the table and moved without purpose around the chairs and tables and tubs of scarlet blooms and sat down again. The cruel afternoon wore on and none of us spoke, or bothered to look at one another. Ned poured Scotch until we began to simply pass the bottle, and then a second, from one seemingly ownerless hand to the next.

No shaving of coconut, or finely sliced lime, or rattle of ice against the smooth sides of a silver shaker dressed up our drinking that day. It was just plain liquor in plain glasses, and yet, I did not manage to reach the lack of consciousness I desired. I was still hypnotized by the inner round and round of my own petty thoughts and miseries when Richard's big, boy athlete's frame filled the patio doors.

“Where's Howie?” he asked.

“He's—” Ned stood, palms on the table, just as Howie, though he could not have heard the inquiry, came racing around the corner of the house. He stopped abruptly at the sight of his father, almost losing his balance, and his grin faded. Richard looked grim. Perhaps Howie anticipated a telling-off for running on the poolside tiles; he had been scolded for it many times before. He scowled.

“Come here, son,” Richard said, reaching his broad hand toward the boy's shoulder.

For the second time, we stood on an unspoken order and drifted, this time in different directions. Ned and I walked, devoid of intention, to the front of the house. The others must have gone inside.

“It's great, isn't it, Frankie?” Jenny asked.

There was a sort of hut made of towels and vegetable crates on the grass. It had a flap door. Jessica demonstrated how it worked for Ned and me. “Do you want to go in?” she asked. “It's sort of hot in there though.”

Ned said, “Maybe later, cookie.”

Jenny and Jessica stood in their checked frocks in front of us. Their faces were questioning.

“Is Howie going to bring Dad to see our fort?” Jessica asked.

“I don't think so, kid,” Ned answered. Then he took the girls by a hand each and, gravely, led the three of us back to the house.

We walked past Richard and Howie. Richard's eyes were closed and both his arms were clasped rigid around the child on his knee, whose head was buried in his father's chest. Richard seemed to be holding him there with some force. I had a fleeting concern for the boy's ability to breathe. I did not act on it.

Inside, it was a moment before I could see properly, and the short walk seemed to have sent the drink at last to my legs. I was unsteady and sat heavily on one of the wicker chairs. Mason was in the other one, his head drooping. At the sideboard, Sally stood next to Bee Bee, who was tilting precariously. Paige and Lesley were there too, silent and curled against each other on the daybed. Magazines lay, unread, in their laps. They were both watching the adults with dark, worried eyes.

“Ned,” Sally said after a moment. “Would you?” She inclined her head neatly to take in all the children and raised her eyebrows, then turned to leave the room.

Bee Bee shot Ned a grateful, drunken, half-faced smile and followed Sally. And while I sat staring after them with breathless amazement, Mason, with the assistance of two palms on the arms of his chair, got up and left as well, slinking without a backward glance to his wife's side.

“
Tell us!”
Paige ordered, her mother's command in her voice.

The twins, by some instinct, nestled themselves on my knee. The chair was wide and they just fit. I stroked the fine, soft skin on their arms.

I cannot recall the exact words that Ned used, but I know that he did not fall back on any of the euphemisms that people generally do when they tell these sorts of things to children. The twins began to cry. I lowered my head to theirs and I cried too.

Eventually, the children drew together and huddled, forlornly comforting each other. I would have been superfluous then if it weren't for the arrival of the undertaker, who had been given my name by Arturo. He shook my hand solemnly at the front door and assured me with deep gravity that Señor Rodriguez had everything in hand. Not a worry, not the slightest concern should I trouble myself with. Christina led the undertaker and his assistant, without me, to the room where Patsy lay and apparently escorted them and their sad cargo, by some prethought plan, out via a servants' route, unknown to those who most needed sparing from the sight.

Richard and Howie did not move from their position at the poolside until, just as the crackle of the undertaker's car wheels started on the driveway, Howie broke free with a howling flap and ran. Not toward the front of the house and the vehicle that bore his mother away, but across the terrace and through the wooden gate to the beach path. Ned flew after him, while Richard let his arms drop lifelessly to his sides.

Paige, separating herself from the twins, who had worn themselves out with tears, walked out through the glass doors, into the fading sunlight. Her back to us, she stood behind Richard and, without hesitating, laid one soft hand on his shoulder. I watched as, still staring ahead, he lifted his arm and slowly closed his fingers over hers.

ELEVEN

I
STOOD, NO USE
any longer to anybody, and went to my room. There, in the center of the floor, I found my canvas bag. Packed. And a note, written in a hand that I did not recognize, asking me to be ready to leave at eight o'clock in the morning.

When I woke for the last time in that house, I told myself that it was the last time, and did not believe it. It was before dawn. The sky outside was still tinted with dark. I tugged a pillow to me and held it, feeling sick, hungover. After a while I got up to get a glass of water and drank it staring blankly out at the pool. I watched as the sun rose, rich and gorgeous and golden over it, just as if nothing had happened.

By seven thirty I was dressed and standing next to my unmade bed, staring at the luggage that I had not packed. I had been instructed to be ready by eight. That left a yawning half hour. In the face of it I felt ill again.

The sickness combined with the precision of the instructions robbed me of all initiative, though I thought briefly about going downstairs and telephoning for a taxi. I assumed, I think, that a taxi had already been organized. That at eight o'clock exactly, some prearranged, unfamiliar vehicle would bear me at last away. The driver would smile and light a cigarette and ask me a lot of questions about the house.

Outside it was quiet. More than quiet, silent. I sat and watched the clock for twelve and a half minutes, and then I stood, resolute, and hoisted my bag by two worn handles and walked out of the beautiful room for the final time, through the cool hallways, and down the airy stairwell.

“Good morning.”

I came to a sudden petrified halt, one hand stiff on the door handle.

Sally was waiting in the room where we had gathered all those nights for cocktails, in the room where the children had played so often and so noisily, in the room where Mason had once taken advantage of a brief absence of hers to kiss me. She was standing in the center of it, perfectly poised, in linen trousers, a rope of gold chain at her neck. The keys to the Buick were looped around her fingers and, eyes on mine, mine on hers, she lifted her dark glasses at a sauntering pace and put them on.

I was astonished. But I said nothing and followed her.

In front of the house she opened the car's passenger door, as if to emphasize that I was supposed to get in, and left it gaping while she walked around the hood and slid behind the wheel. I dropped my things first, behind my seat, then sat and tugged the door closed after me. We stared, both of us, stonily dead ahead, as she started the engine and that great sturdy ship of a vehicle crept to the gate and onward.

The wind had taken Cactus Roy's hat. He seemed bereft. Looking at him I thought sadly of the twins. I would have liked to have said goodbye. But the twins, I knew, belonged to a life from which I was already disconnected, severed, so I quit the thought and set my gaze ahead again, glassily divorced from the whole world, till we reached the rubbish dump and I found myself searching, hoping, for Jessica's boy. I wanted to wave to him as her proxy. He wasn't there.

Sally had had to slow her uniform pace because of the usual gang of ballplayers, and I thought of the day that Patsy had demonstrated her version of the accident.

“Patsy said you'd faked it,” I said, my voice coming from some unknown, faraway part of me. For a second I wasn't sure if I had spoken out loud, but there was a tiny contraction of her features at the mention of Patsy's name and it spurred me on. “The accident. In fact,” I said, “she showed me how you'd done it.”

“What of it?” Her eyebrow arched casually.

“You might have hurt Bee Bee…or someone else,” I replied, less confident now. Her composure had set me back.

“Bee Bee was so drunk she'd have bounced off a brick wall, and no one else was around. It was the middle of the night.” She was completely calm.

“You did that, just to get”—I could not say Mason's name, lest my voice break, so I said—“your husband's attention.”

She glanced sideways. “Mason needs reminding from time to time just how much he depends on me.” I felt like a moth on a pin. She smiled. “Bee Bee was in on it,” she said patiently, as if explaining something obvious to a rather dull child.

Sally and I did not speak again until she pulled up outside the sorry stone of my apartment block. We both looked at it, she as if from a great distance. Then she cut the engine and nestled back a little in her seat, angled toward me, as if prolonging a pleasant day out. I didn't move. Even the chill rain of her company seemed at that moment preferable to the terrible emptiness that I knew would follow.

She removed her dark glasses and tapped them, rhythmically, two, three, four times against her knee. I realized, perhaps for the first time, that she had a right to be angry with me. That I had it coming. I braced myself, dully, to take it.

“I don't usually get the chance to confront one of you,” she said. I knew what she meant and wished that I didn't. “The opportunity doesn't arise,” she went on. “I just have to tolerate it. Women at parties, women in department stores, women at tennis tournaments. All those women who think they have something over me because they've slept with my husband.”

There was a pause, brief and tortured, between us.

“Because, you see, when men say, ‘It meant nothing,' which is exactly what he'll say about you”—I shut my eyes at that and sailed, screaming, from an imaginary cliff top—“it's true. But that's not what the woman thinks, is it? The dizzy Delilah. That's not what
you
think, is it? You persist, just like all the silly, pointless others, wed to some smug notion that something
happened
between you and my husband.”

I avoided looking at her. She was right. Despite everything, she was right.

“It didn't,” she announced flatly.

I turned then. There was something so distinct, so knowing in her tone. There was more.

“I set you up.”

And still more, I knew. I waited, mute.

“You still haven't figured it out, have you? The whole thing was my idea. Think,” she urged. “Who invited you to the house? Who suggested that you stay? Who sent you off on all those cozy little twosome jaunts into town, along the beach?”

Sally, my brain answered. Sally had. A feeling like ice dripping began to make its way down my spine.

“So you see, there was nothing particularly special about
you.
You were just a…pawn is rather corny. You were bait. I needed you to get him away from Patsy.”

It was as if I had been slapped.

Sally's face, for the first time, betrayed something real, a flash of pain, or fear, or hurt. She turned away, gazing ahead over the steering wheel and ran a finger along the lower curve of it.

“You recognize it when it finally comes along, the genuine threat.” She straightened against the car door. “Patsy Luke very nearly had him.”

Suddenly, inhaling, she smiled and engaged my eye line. “But then I saw you. Little Frances. Just the kind of light entertainment that Mason can never resist. And would
never
leave home for.”

Ridiculously, this hurt.

“Well, you needn't look so affronted,” Sally said. “You've just been caught screwing a married man.”

The grimy smallness of the thing. A holiday fling with a habitual philanderer. It was the stuff of jokes and cheap paperbacks. I didn't want to hear any more.

“Look,” she said then, almost softly, “here's something for free. By the time you can take a man from a woman like me, you won't want Mason.”

Her tone had caught me. “Why do
you
?” I asked.

She held my eyes. “We're a team,” she replied.

She leaned sharply across me and flipped my door latch. “Don't waste your time trying to think of an appropriate goodbye,” she said. “I don't want to hear it.” She turned her perfect profile to me, lifted her dark glasses from the dashboard, and slid them up her nose. “My husband is going to be wondering where I am,” she said.

On cotton legs I got out and opened the rear door to retrieve my bag. Then I shut both doors. Twin thuds.

Sally Severance pulled the car deftly from the curb and drove away without looking back. I watched, transfixed, until the tail of the car had disappeared in the distance. Then I turned slowly toward the apartment block. Music from several open doorways competed for space in the courtyard.

“Hola,” somebody called.

I didn't call back.

At my door I paused, fishing for the single brass key. It was only as I twisted it in the lock that I realized that Sally had not asked for directions.

By the morning the rush of tears was spent, but, sitting half dressed on the messy bed in the airless apartment, I felt the sour prick of self-pity in my throat. I hated them all, I hated my life, and I had a new eye for the cramped unattractiveness of my surroundings. I dropped my legs, sulkily, over the bed edge, and then, for a beat, held still. I could smell him. Through the thin, unreal atmosphere of weariness and defeat, I could smell him in the warm dust of the tiny apartment. I shut my eyes and caught the scent of cloves at the base of his neck.

Eventually I showered and dressed, taking something that I had not worn during those weeks of thrilling elation from the bureau drawer. I walked the eleven milling blocks to Letty's house and stood on her green porch amid the screaming parrot-bright press of flowering plants and told her mother that I was leaving Mexico. It seemed that these were the first solid words to have come out of my own mouth for a long time. Letty's mother took my hands and said she was sorry and invited me in, but I declined, and turned, and walked, in that curious bleak state between misery and exhaustion, back to the apartment and shut the door behind me.

At some point during the afternoon of that veiled day, a burst of reasonless, lunatic hope sent me responding to a knock at the door with my heart crashing in my chest. I smoothed my hair with automatic hands before I answered it.

Maria had come. Her cherub features were drawn with sadness. She lifted her arms so that her creamy wrists spilled from the heavy sleeves of her dress, and she hugged me. At her motherly, comforting touch I cried.

“Tu amiga,” she crooned soothingly. “Tu bonita amiga…y los bambinos.” She shook her head with the great weight of her pain for the death of my pretty friend and the terrible loss for the baby boys.

I was ashamed. I wiped my eyes quickly and invited her in. When she was settled I told her that I would go away. To my parents. She thought this most appropriate and nodded gravely. For a moment I considered, in the face of her simple sincerity, telling her everything. Just to tell it. My side. As Sally had told her side to me. But I let her leave, instead, with her image of me intact.

Alone again, I began to pack up the apartment with a kind of manic fervor, emptying drawers and laying busy little piles of belongings about the place, as if they meant something. I lifted the canvas bag that had been packed two nights before by unknown hands, placed it on the bed, and removed a soft wedge of folded clothes. The bracelet that Mason had given me fell from them and landed with a rickety clatter on the floor.

I looked at the bracelet for a second, then lay the clothes down to pick it up. I put it on, twisting my wrist to clasp it, then dropping it again so that the line of gold links fell tenderly against the outward curve of my hand. I remembered him giving it to me. I didn't imagine all of it, I thought. I didn't.

When I finished packing, I made a parcel of things that I could not carry and black-inked my parent's address on the front of it. Then I went to sleep and dreamed, as I would for many years, of Patsy.

In the morning I did not have to walk to the bus station because Maria arrived early with Arturo's car. On the way to town she held my hand in her warmer one and assured me that she would see that my parcel was posted. She laid her free palm squarely on the string to confirm this.

Maria watched as the driver took my luggage from the trunk and then stood importantly next to it while I bought my ticket. When I turned again from the glassed ticket window, pocketing my change, I saw Letty. She was standing, neat and small, under the arch that led to the wide stretch of pavement where the buses pulled up. Drivers paced there, shouting destinations, and children sold chewing gum from trays at their waists. I walked over to her.

“You will write to me?” she asked in her precise English.

“Yes, Letty. I will.”

She handed me a small packet. Taped red tissue paper.

“For you,” she said. “A goodbye gift.”

“Thank you, Letty.” I took the present. It felt soft in my hands.

“Open it later,” she said.

My bags were hurried into the bus's dark underbelly and the driver called for tickets. Maria kissed my cheek and Letty began, silently, to cry. I held her for a moment, and then I took off Mason's bracelet, which was still clasped to my wrist, and slipped it onto hers.