The View from Here (5 page)

“I won't be long.”

“I'll give you a hand,” he offered.

The children quit their game. The ball was tossed, nonchalantly, toward the smallest one, who caught it and held it firmly, arms against his chest. A neighbor of mine, jutting a baby on her hip, called “Hola” from her doorway. I told her I'd be away for a while.

“Sí,” she said, diverting one of the baby's chubby hands from her chin and sliding her knowing eyes over Mason.

Fishing the key from my bag, I said, “You shouldn't really come in. Men wait outside here if your husband's not at home.”

He grinned. “No husbands in there then?”

“No live ones.”

He twisted his head over his shoulder toward the neighbor, who had edged herself around behind us. At his look she slipped swiftly back inside. He stepped through the door behind me.

My living arrangements comprised a single, tile-floored room and a bathroom. Mason sat in the only armchair and let his glance skirt the perimeter while I took a canvas travel bag out from under a chest of drawers and dropped it onto the bed. I began to pack things randomly. Books. Clothes.

“How did you get here, Frankie?” His voice was low, not particularly interrogatory.

“Adam taught a boy whose father owned the block.”

“No, I mean how did you get
here
?” He tipped himself back in the chair and raised both hands, palms upwards.

I hesitated, considering the tale of my childhood, the lonely trail around the world in the wake of my father's career, army base to duller army base. The eventual quitting of it. My mother's sad eyes when I gave up my first job as a nursery school teacher in Singapore. I bunched the soft fabric of the dress I was holding into the bag and zipped it decisively. “Oh. You know. One adventure after another.” He smiled, stood, and took the bag from me. No more questions. I was glad. Lately, I had begun to find the shapelessness of my own existence disconcerting.

• • •

Something had led me, of course, to that letter, to Phillip's desk in the first place. A hunch. A sense that something was wrong. Suspicion. She's a staple of men's angry humor, isn't she, the suspicious wife? And I am sure that they exist, those women whose insecurities turn every look, every conversation into something more, something with wickedness in it. But I am not one of them, nor, I think, are many other women. I am, however, like most wives, suspicious from time to time.

It did not occur to me during the first seven years of our marriage that Phillip would be unfaithful. That either of us would be. We seemed too sound for that sort of silliness, too stable. And I can say, too, that between years ten and eighteen I regained this sense of unassailability. But in our eighth year, the year that Chloe turned thirteen and her sweetness was coarsened slightly by the onset of adolescence, the year that I turned the playhouse in the garden into a studio for myself and took painting classes to replace some of her fading need of me, Anthea came to work for Phillip.

I met Anthea early in her employment because in those days I used to go to events at the office sometimes. It was a going-away thing I guess, or someone's birthday. Tom and Phillip are those modern sorts of employers who mark these occasions with drinks and expensive snacks from the local delicatessen or staff outings to nearby restaurants where the owners know them. Anyway, there was Anthea when I arrived, all plumply cheerful and as relaxed as if she had worked at Creel & Grace forever. She had been there for three weeks.

If I had forced myself to consider the possibility at that time that another woman could threaten my marriage, I would never have cast Anthea in the role. I thought her slightly stupid. It sounds arrogant, I know, but I did. On the days that Phillip worked at home she telephoned endlessly, checking details with him, lengthening these conversations with chat, like a teenager, though she was older than me, late thirties I guessed, about Phillip's age.

It was quite some time before I noticed that Phillip was not complaining about Anthea's calls, that he seemed instead almost to welcome them, his tone taking on a sort of fatherly, indulgent quality whenever he spoke to her. I did notice, though, when he went from talking about Anthea rather a lot to, too abruptly, not talking about her at all. I hunted then, for lipstick on the collar, those sorts of clues. Of course I found some; you always do, ridiculously attaching a moment of small triumph to each discovery—matchbooks from strange restaurants; tell-tale messages, kept and stuffed in pockets; some item, ambiguous, but with a female taint—a scarf. Things that set your nerves on fire and disconnect your brain from your actions.

Anthea had been around for about four months when I set upon Phillip with a clutch full of papery evidence and a belly full of suppressed anxiety. He naturally denied all wrongdoing. It was his aggrieved expression, though, that set light to the ready tinder. He declared himself, too heartily, wronged, the victim of unfairness all around. Innocent as a baby.

Was he? Now I think not, of course, but I also believe that what he had with Anthea was a flirtation, whether consummated or not, a rather childish and potentially, pointlessly, corrosive flirtation fanned by attention-seeking on his part and overt flattery on hers. And I can admit now too, with the wisdom of distance and greater age, that my reaction may have been as futile and biting in terms of our relationship as whatever it was that took place between them.

We got over it, that fracture, but we were both a little scarred, and it took time. And, evidently, the healing was not absolute, because there was something, in the weeks before I went looking for whatever I was looking for and found Josee's letter, that reminded me sharply of that time. Phillip had stopped talking about Josee.

• • •

The room that I had been allocated, during a subtle and almost wordless communication between Sally and Christina, was at the end of a long corridor on the second floor. The only other bedroom the corridor serviced was unoccupied. Christina, directing me, had pulled the door of the vacant space closed as she passed before asking, with a haughtiness I may have imagined, whether there was anything I needed. I had shaken her a distracted no. The bedroom into which she had ushered me, with its perfect balance of light and shadow, of open space and comfort, of simplicity and elegance, was to define my notion of luxury for the rest of my life.

I spent a pleasant dusk dozing, feline, on sheets that smelled of lavender. Then I got up to dress, knowing as I did that nothing I owned was adequate to my surroundings, or to the company I was suddenly keeping. I put on a simple, light blue shift, withered a little from many wearings. It was ankle length and made of some weightless stuff that clung when I walked. And then I went downstairs to my first night as an official guest at that golden house on the cactus shore.

It was like a lot of the nights that followed, but I remember it better. There was a pitcher of martinis. Patsy, all in white, stood in the corner holding one at her chest, her chin almost resting on the rim of her glass. She looked as if she had stepped off a billboard advertising something that a sultan would have to save up for.

Mason played barman. “Martini, ma'am?”

“Thank you,” I said. I had never drunk a martini in my life.

After dinner, on the unnecessary excuse that my official arrival called for celebration, we drove into town, everybody laughing and carrying glasses, horns blaring and cars pulling over so that people could switch places for no particular reason at the roadside. Ned, in high good spirits, a cigar in one hand and a brandy in the other, steered the Buick the whole way with his knees.

We went to La Roseleda. It was an ordinary enough place, but they were thrilled with it, and in the stardust of their company, even the cakey orange smile of the familiar fat girl at the bar took on new glamour.

The owner, recognizing me, beamed at the clientele I had brought him and showed us, with novel pomp, to a table by the window. He took our drinks order himself and, a few minutes later, oversaw the careful work of a waiter unloading them from a tray.

Mason began to drum a soft fingertip rhythm on the table edge, and Patsy, next to him, put down her cigarette and jumped to her feet. “Come on,” she said, taking his hand. Her hips swiveled figure eights as she wound him through the tables. At her back, Sally lifted her cigarette, which was still smoldering, between a manicured finger and thumb, and, expressionless, extinguished it, dropping the butt into a large black ashtray before brushing off her hand, as if some of the lipstick staining its tip might have adhered. It hadn't.

In front of the small raised area where the band played, Patsy turned and smiled, lifting her chin a little, and Mason, pulling her to him, smiled too. Watching them as they were drawn into the shadowy loop of the other dancers, I was surprised by a sudden tug of loneliness in the pit of my stomach.

“Frankie…Frankie?” Ned had to shout over the music. “Dance?” He jerked his head toward the dance floor and winked.

I was glad to dance with Ned. He was easy and smooth footed.

“Quite the little mover, aren't you?” He grinned.

I laughed. He twisted me away from him and spun me deftly back.

“You're a good kid,” he announced suddenly, leaning back to look into my eyes. And then, settling his cheek again nearer to mine, he said, “Watch yourself,” or at least I thought that was what he said; it was difficult to hear.

Back at the table, as I retook my seat, he stood behind me for a moment with both hands on my shoulders. It was a gesture that felt paternal.

The crowd had thickened with the night and the band was playing something loud when a man with a neat crease in his trousers approached our table and asked Mason's permission to dance with his wife.

“He says,” I translated, “that she is a very lovely woman, and you are a husband very lucky and that, while he is dancing with her, he will leave with you his car keys…for security.”

Mason glanced over at Sally and then turned to the man, who was staring intently at Patsy.

“He thinks Patsy is your wife.”

“Shall we tell him?”

“No,” I said. I was wary of the kind of embarrassment the contradiction would cause.

Mason put his shirtsleeved arm on Patsy's slender bare one and whispered into her hair. She listened, her brow slightly creased, with her head inclined. Then she laughed. When she stood up, the man took a set of keys from his pocket and laid them with some ceremony on the table.

“Tell him five minutes.”

“Cinco minutos.”

After the man had collected his keys and deposited Patsy, giggly, back at the table, tequilas arrived. With the compliments, explained the patron, gesturing toward the bar where the man raised his glass to the lucky husband.

“To lucky husbands everywhere,” Ned said.

“To what?” Richard yelled, cocking his head.

“Lucky husbands.”

“Oh, yeah,” Richard grinned. “Here's to 'em.”

Bee Bee raised her tequila. “And Patsy's pert little rear,” she added.

Everybody laughed except Sally who, tequila untouched, slid one corner of her silk shawl onto her shoulder, readying to leave. She spoke across the table to her husband. “You should dance with Frankie before we go. It's her party.”

Mason, apologetic, asked me to dance. I was embarrassed. There was something vaguely adolescent about the situation, like being invited to parties by the prompted sons of my mother's friends, but I stood anyway and went with him to the dance floor. He put his hand on the small of my back and said, “I like your dress.”

I was grateful for that; it made so many things easier. Then, drawn against him, I noticed the width of his shoulders and the smell, faint, at the base of his neck, of cloves.

On the way home we killed a dog. It was a stray, scrawny and ill-looking—the town was full of them—but Bee Bee, who had been driving, was upset, and drunk enough to turn maudlin. When the carcass had been hauled to the side of the road, Sally, laying her shimmery little handbag deftly on the dash, took steady control of the Buick while Ned and Richard and I sat sobering up to the heavy soundtrack of Bee Bee's sobs.

Patsy and Mason had gone ahead in the jeep, Patsy snatching the keys from Mason's hand under the soft light of a street lamp and running with them, her dress rising, sail-like, behind her. They had sped off, Mason laughing, clambering into the passenger seat after the car had already begun to move, like a television hero.

At the house they were sitting outside, opposite each other in the dark.

“I thought we'd lost you,” Mason said, looking up at our arrival. He was leaning forward, lighting the cigarette between Patsy's lips with her silver lighter. When he edged back their knees disengaged.

“We hit a dog,” Richard explained.

“Killed it,” Bee Bee slurred, ragged now from drink and crying.

Sally, watching her friend with an expression that struck me as a bit pitiless, said in an even voice, “It was just a stray.”

Bee Bee, her mascara-stained eyes wild-looking in the blue glow of the pool lights, stared, momentarily on the dangerous edge of anger, but Ned, nurselike, reached an arm out to her, and she acquiesced, letting him lead her slowly into the house.

“I need to get cleaned up,” Richard said, holding his hands open like a child. He turned toward his wife, expectant. It was very late.

“It's very late,” Sally confirmed. Then with the same cool expression she had leveled at Bee Bee, she turned to Patsy. “Let me relieve you of my husband, dear,” she said.

Patsy drew hard on her cigarette, her eyes on Mason. He dropped his head and got to his feet.

“See you in the morning, Frankie,” he said, passing me as he followed his wife inside.

Behind him Patsy turned toward the dark of the sea. She didn't answer when I said goodnight.

• • •