Rich Rewards (15 page)

It depressed me quite a lot, though, as well as making me angry. I drove across those lovely hills, still green despite the drought, with terribly lowered spirits. And the view of the Bay was especially beautiful that day, in the unnatural midwinter heat: I wondered what on earth I was doing in California, with my sad and aging dark heart, in the gorgeous land of the young and blond. Agatha and I should both leave, I thought then; clear out, the two of us. Royce and Stacy could have their California.

Being low-spirited in California is hard on a basically Puritan conscience like my own; you are not only depressed but you feel guilty about it, as though you had been ungrateful to generous Nature, who had placed such a bounty of beauty there before you. I sped over the hills, down to the pretty town of Sausalito and through it, speedily. Crossing the bridge, I could have been racing toward a lover, instead of just away from the sight of a beautiful day.

Back home, back in Agatha’s house, I was grateful for the shutters, the lack of views. For privacy.

Predictably, I guess, as I worked without much interest on a set of drawings for the upstairs room, I became prey to the most violent longings to be somewhere else. Visions of once-loved scenery paraded across my inner consciousness:
I saw Portuguese beaches; a tropical rain forest in Mexico; Fifth Avenue, across from Central Park; bridges across the Arno, from a Florentine balcony, and at last I saw Paris, the last and loveliest city.

Once, when I was actually in Paris, I took one of those excursion boats that go down the Seine; they start not far from Concorde and go down along the Left Bank to the Ile de la Cité, past Notre Dame, around the Ile Saint-Louis and back again to the Right Bank, as far as the Trocadéro. As I now retook this trip, imaginatively, the view that most moved me was that of the far side of the Ile Saint-Louis: the thin bare poplars against the old stones of beautiful tall houses with leaded windows, entrancing walled gardens.

Twenty years ago I had walked there with Jean-Paul, and I had exclaimed, “Oh, this is where we should live together! This is the most beautiful—”

He laughed. “You also pick by far the most expensive. In that house”—he narrowed his blue eyes speculatively—“I believe is the home of the Prince of Paris.”

The prospect of never living on the Ile Saint-Louis of course did not bother Jean-Paul at all, but I think that he minded for me; and at that time I had no way to tell him that I was not serious. I didn’t care at all where I lived, I didn’t really care about anything but him. That was the absolute truth of it, but had I made the statement, I think he would have found such total dedication to himself quite as alarming as my supposed desire to live in fancy places.

But maybe I should have said it anyway. He might as well have known.

And now, twenty years later, I still felt so strongly for Jean-Paul, and for all that I had missed by not spending my life with him, that I could hardly bear it.

If you happen, as I do, to be frequently depressed at Christmastime, you can even come to be bored by that depression, and recognition of that boredom can almost function as a cure: how tiresome to feel low just then, along with everyone else. It is not just the fact of Christmas, though, that I find so disheartening, not being especially plagued by bad memories of that holiday. It is rather a literal seasonal sense that makes me sad—if you take the winter solstice seriously, Christmas becomes the nadir of the year. I see the months and weeks before Christmas as a tumbling downward into darkness and cold. And once Christmas is over, I think it should be spring; January snow is always a surprise, and very unwelcome.

However, allowances for all my private superstitions notwithstanding, the Christmas I spent in California was particularly difficult; it was full of terrible, violent news, as well as the more ordinary forms of dreariness.

Crazily enough, in early December, I began to be unhappy about Tony, what was going on between us. Or, rather, not going on. I was still glad, on the whole, that we had never fallen into bed together, although I was afflicted with sexual fantasies, sometimes vivid dreams of sex with Tony. Rather like Lady Brett giving up her bullfighter—with
the marked difference that I had not had Tony to give up—I had “felt good” about it. But now, near Christmas, it seemed to me that we were not only not making love, we were hardly speaking. He did his work in a new, glum way; he barely smiled. And of course I took this personally: he was tired of the job, or, much worse, he was aware of my sexual interest—he somehow knew about those dreams—and was definitively turning me down. It was not I who had said no, after all.

One problem, of course, was that I still saw him all the time; there he was in my house—in Agatha’s house—at work, attractively lithe and brown, in his tight clean jeans. He had one of the prettiest asses I had ever seen, so high and round, smooth, hard—or so I imagined it would be.

I was not only depressed about Tony, I was depressed about being depressed about him, which was quite an emotional setback, as I saw it. And at Christmas, as we rushed toward the bottom of the year.

Once Jacob, who although a junkie was probably my wisest lover ever—I haven’t yet been able to think of Jean-Paul in terms of wisdom—Jacob said, “You really put a double-whammy on yourself: you worry, and then you worry about worrying. Daphne, you are hopeless.” Well, Jake was certainly in a position to know a lot about double-whammies.

In any event, I felt that Tony and I were at an impasse. And I don’t think it would ever have been resolved if he had not been the one to tell me about Caroline.

I had been out shopping, one balmy dry December afternoon, looking for sheets and towels, all that bedroom-bathroom stuff which I normally don’t concern myself with for clients—in the trade it is called “accessorizing.” But Agatha had said so despairingly, “Please, Daph. It’s just something I can’t do, or think about.” I think she had been having a lot of trouble with Royce, of one sort or another.

Actually the rooms involved were not quite that far along, but since we had settled on the carpeting and fabrics, I thought I might as well see what was around. Also, in those days I was staying out as much as I could. Thinking that Tony was avoiding me, I decided I could at least make it easier for him, as well as for myself.

I believe now that I had really forgotten what season it was, which is easy enough to do in California. But there it was:
Christmas
, Christmas shoppers, tinsel decorations across the streets—what a terrible surprise. And perhaps because my own spirits were somewhat low to begin with, everyone I saw looked harassed and anxious, tired. I watched two women, possibly mother and daughter, fingering and then holding up a flowered sports shirt, for a man. It was expensive-looking, and quite terrible, and I imagined the scene that would take place on Christmas morning: the husband-father opening his present, pretending to like it but not going so far as to put it on and wear it, ever; the mother and daughter opening their similarly expensive and disappointing presents. And the rest of the spring, all of them working to pay off their bills, and those ruinous interest charges, 18 percent.

I stood it as long as I could, that Christmas-shopping scene, among the unbecoming, unseasonal fur coats, the crazy-looking tinsel in the sun, and then, before noon, I bolted away as fast as I could. I raced back to the relative safety and sanity of Pacific Heights, Agatha’s house.

There in the kitchen was Tony, standing up and drinking a cup of coffee, frowning nervously. He had been waiting for me to come home, that was clear, and with bad news: the gravity of it was written all over his face.

He walked toward me. I thought he meant to put his arms around me, some friendly gesture, and maybe that had been his intention, but then he stopped short and blurted out at me, “Caroline’s been beat up.”

Sometimes my reactions are nuttily slow. I asked him several questions before I really took in what had happened. I asked: When? Who did it? Where is she?
How
is she?

It happened sometime last night, Tony said. Thomas found her on the steps leading up to her apartment; whether she was going in or coming out was not clear. No one knew who had beat her up, nor where, she was just lying there. Now she was at Mount Zion Hospital.

In the midst of hearing all this, I suddenly felt a jolt of cold terror, horror, fear. Lovely Caroline.
Beat up.

I sat down at the table where Tony had put his cup of coffee, and in a dumb automatic way I sipped at it.

He asked, “Do you want me to make you some?”

“What? Oh, no. Thanks, Tony.”

Outside, the unnatural sun shone on the glossy green leaves of a giant rhododendron, and on the new wood of the deck that Tony was making. I could even smell the fresh-cut wood, I thought, and it seemed a summer smell—all wrong.

Caroline. Beat up.

I stood up, and started toward the door. “I’ll go over there, to the hospital.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“Oh, Tony—
yes.
”

I drove fast and silently the short distance to the hospital. Once or twice I glanced over in Tony’s direction, and he took my hand and patted it.

He told me where there was a parking lot off Post Street, and how to
get
there.

Within minutes after leaving the car we were inside the hospital, then inside an elevator, pneumatically borne upward. We got out at the appointed floor and began to walk toward the number of Caroline’s room. A pale woman in a fur coat was walking in our direction, a full-length mink. The woman’s face was pasty, wild-eyed, crazy; she could have
been about to scream. And as we passed each other I recognized her: Ruth Houston. She did not even see us, I am sure.

This scared me badly, though: I wasn’t sure that we should go in to see Caroline if seeing her had so deranged Ruth, her mother. I stopped and asked Tony, “Do you really think we should go in? Did you see her mother?”

“Oh, sure. Whitey told me a couple of weeks ago that he thought his old lady was flipping out.”

So we knocked lightly at a door, and a soft voice answered, “Come in?” A question; it meant, who were we?

We pushed open the door and went it.

There were two white beds, two women in them, both with long brown hair. For a minute I was uncertain which was Caroline, and then my mind cleared somewhat, and I saw that the hair in the first bed was dyed and the face that of a very old woman, painfully lined. I started toward the second bed, the one beside the window, where Caroline lay.

She said, “Oh, hi,” in an unfamiliar voice—sluggish, faraway. And then she said, more familiarly, “
Fuck
, I was afraid you were my mother coming back. All I’d need.”

She looked ghastly. Purple, and outlandishly swollen. Her eyes were terrible slits and her mouth puffy and red, cracked, distorted. Nearly most shocking of all was her hair; it looked dead, a single dull drab shade of brown. What before had been so vivid and lively, bright.

I could easily have cried, just then, and so I concentrated on not doing so, on keeping control, keeping cool.

It was Tony who, in a choked voice, asked her how she was feeling.

“Shitty, actually,” she said. “And my mother, Jesus: she comes to the fucking hospital to tell me that I’ve got to tell my father to take her back.”

Across the street, glaringly visible from Caroline’s window,
was a funeral parlor. A blatantly tasteless, eminently practical juxtaposition, I guess. But how horrifying for someone seriously, perhaps terminally ill.

“She’s gone crazy, she really bugs me,” Caroline said, of her mother. She spoke in a far-off voice, and must have been heavily drugged, God knows with what. I could not help thinking how good it would be, in the long run, for Agatha if Ruth and Royce did in fact get back together.

I managed to ask, “Caroline, can I bring you something, anything?”

“No, just get me out of here.” She twisted her mouth; she could have been about to cry, but she did not.

Tony went over and patted her hair; gently he kissed her cheek. And that day, in one of his oldest, most bleached-out brown work shirts and faded khaki jeans, he was as beautiful as a deer.

The woman on the other bed groaned and stirred; she groped about for something, something to grasp and hold, and then I saw the light flash on over her bed.

Becoming aware of her, this miserably sick woman, I thought too of certain absent people who were connected to this room, to Caroline: where were Whitey, and Royce, and Thomas?

Caroline said, “You guys really better go. I have to deal with this myself.”

Tony asked, “Thomas coming by?”

“Yes. Later. Daphne, thanks for coming over.” She turned her face to the window, and we tiptoed out, almost bumping into the nurse who was just coming through the door.

*

Back at Agatha’s house, Tony and I sat across from each other at the table, over mugs of tomato soup, canned, which I had heated up. Into which we were both nervously breaking soda crackers.

We hadn’t talked at all while I was opening the can, lighting the stove. And at last I asked the question that hung so heavily between us. “Well, who do
you
think did it? Someone she knew?” For myself, I already thought I knew who had so violently hurt her.

Tony looked miserably uncomfortable, but he faced me fully, heavy dark brown eyes raised to mine. “I don’t know. I couldn’t say,” he said.

“I wonder where the rest of her family was today. Royce—and Whitey?”

“Oh, Whitey’s gone up to Alaska,” Tony said quickly. Too quickly? Had he read my mind? “He was going to go last week,” he said.

Well, so much for my intuitive flash. I had of course been sure that it was Whitey, dead sure. I had almost been able to see and hear their quarrel, violent shouts about nothing, mounting rage—sexual in its intensity—until Whitey exploded, slapped her, hit her. Beat her up.

But if Whitey was in Alaska I was wrong, and probably I had just thought of him because I didn’t like him.

With a small bleak laugh, Tony said, “Thomas. Mr. Houston’s sure it’s him that beat her up.”