A Small Indiscretion (29 page)

“They’re fifteen-watt halogen bulbs encased in clear glass,” I said. “I thought the diamond shape was a nice twist on an ordinary bulb. And it casts a different kind of light.”

“I agree,” she said, tapping her finger lightly on each bulb. “But you mustn’t sell it. It’s too beautiful. And it’s powerful, too: The geometry of the diamond held in meditation allows a higher understanding of the soul.”

I
NEVER DID
put a price tag on the arc light. Instead, I moved it to hang over the table on which I displayed our vintage lamp collection. At least that way it was casting light on products I might indeed sell. I emailed a photograph of the whole display to the Swedish designer of the diamond bulbs, asking if he was interested in posting it on his website as a unique application of his lights. He responded the next day with an invitation to display the arc light in his booth at the biggest architectural lighting show of the year, in London, in a week’s time.

I sat at my desk and read his email again and again. It was not practical for me to skip town for a week, given my responsibilities at the store and at home. Nor was it practical to ship a wine barrel of concrete and a ten-foot pine branch overseas. But I could not stop thinking about it. Perhaps I could find a babysitter for the girls. Perhaps Emme could help at the store. Perhaps I could build a new light when I got there. I could use local materials and assemble the arc light in a few days, as I had done here. Decorative branches were all the rage for interiors. I could simply order the organic material wholesale. It did not need to be pine. It could as easily be oak, or birch. It could even be fabricated, not a real branch at all.

I told Jonathan about the offer. Right away, he said I must go, as I should have known he would. He said I deserved it. He said it was not fair that he was the only one who ever traveled for business. He would handle Clara and Polly—he could work from home—and Emme could hold down the fort at the store.

“Just go,” he said, over and over. “Go.”

Was there treachery in my accepting his generosity? Perhaps there was, since London was the last place I knew Patrick Ardghal to have lived. But I wouldn’t have known where to begin looking for him there. Or, at least, I wouldn’t have known where to look that I had not already looked. That summer, I had searched the web exhaustively for Patrick Ardghal, and though many other Ardghals had turned up, Patrick had not.

I
CALLED MY
mother.

“Just go,” she said. And then, “If you do go, would you be home by Labor Day weekend?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Why?”

“Well, I might be coming for a visit. We both might. Your dad and I.”

“Dad?”

“Yes.”

“How did this suddenly come about?”

“He and Veronica Cox got a divorce.”

“They did?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“She’s still drinking. He’s not.”

“Oh.”

“Looks like he’ll be packing up and heading out on a road trip. He says he’s going to come all the way to the West Coast.”

There was a silence. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” I said.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re doing something.”

“Is it such a crime to want to be friends with the man who is the father of your two children?”

“It’s not a crime. It’s just … dangerous.”

“Oh, it’s not dangerous. It’s important, is what it is. It’s important he comes to see his grandchildren.”

“He’s never even met his grandchildren.”

“High time,” she said.

“Was it his idea, or yours?”

She sighed. “Does it matter?”

I
CALLED YOUR
Uncle Ryan, who was living in Venice Beach, working four days a week selling pharmaceuticals. He answered on the sixth ring. He said he was just in from surfing. His life seemed to me shallow and empty, or shallow and alluring, depending on the day. I did not really understand our relationship. We could go months, or a year even, without speaking, but the distance between us collapsed as soon as I called and he picked up the phone. I was always the one to call. I was the older sister, after all.

“Have you talked to Mom?”

“No,” he said. “Why?”

“Dad’s coming out west.”

“He is?”

“For the record, I think this whole thing is a disaster waiting to happen. She wants to bring him for a visit.”

“Really?”

“You’ll have to come see him if he visits San Francisco Labor Day weekend. You’ll come, won’t you?”

“I’ll think about it,” he said. “Tricky getting away.” He changed
the subject. “How’s Robbie? Does he want to come down? I’ve got a new long board he can try out.”

“I’ll ask him. He’s got the job at Berkeley. And he’s been hanging around with this woman who’s working in the store and living in the loft. I’m not exactly clear on the nature of their involvement.”

“Is she hot?”

“Yes.”

“They’re not shacking up or anything, are they?”

“No, they’re not shacking up.”

“Good. He needs to keep it loose.”

“Loose. Yes. I agree with you.”

“Amazing,” he said. “We agree on something.”

“We often agree. Don’t we?”

“Sure we do. Absolutely. Anyway, Annie, the thing to do is not think about Mom and Dad. Just worry about yourself.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Seriously, try it,” my little brother said to me. “Try it this once.”

So I tried it. I put my parents—and my children and my husband—out of my mind, and thought only of myself. I ordered an artificial branch and a wine barrel from a British wholesaler, then I packed my clothes and got on a plane to London.

I
T WAS MY FIRST FLIGHT
without my family in more than twenty years. Appropriate, since I was traveling to the first and last place I had ever lived alone. On the train from Heathrow into London, where I would be staying in a hotel near Hyde Park, I was jet-lagged and suffering the aftereffects of wine I’d consumed on the plane. I had not meant to drink so much. It was not the sort of thing I did these days. But being by myself seemed to liberate me from my obligations. I felt the way I had coming to London the first time: I was alone, and unwatched, and might as well do as I wanted. Now that the flight was over, I was full of regret. I wondered how I would survive seven whole days without your father and the girls. But once I settled in, I enjoyed myself. I did not really miss home until the end.

I arrived in London on a Tuesday, and I was not scheduled to start work on the arc light until Thursday. My hotel was on Park Lane. The room was furnished in deep reds and golds. There was an upholstered chair by the window and an ornate reading lamp and heavy damask drapes pulled closed. The bathroom was spectacularly clean and appointed with tiny fragrant soaps wrapped in pink paper. There were gorgeously thick white robes folded on a shelf in
the bathroom. How different this space was from the plain blue room in Victoria I’d lived in two decades before.

I could hear the wind sweeping across Hyde Park. I pulled back the drapes and there, surprising me somehow after all the time that had passed, was the London evening sky I remembered, tender pink and etched with white clouds. I went out and walked straight to the river. It was summer but not warm. I did not feel lonely, but I felt the memory of loneliness. It rained. I had no umbrella. I had never carried an umbrella then, either. Had I changed so little?

I walked to Embankment Station, where I stumbled upon a memory of being pressed against something—a wall, a bench, the glass partition inside the tube—and kissed by Patrick. It was not that the kisses themselves had been so remarkable, but there was a texture of abandonment in them, and in him, a way he had of giving himself over to a moment, that I remembered.

I decided to take a sunset river cruise. Waiting to buy my ticket, I was distracted by a baby in a pram. The baby was small and dark, its face poking alertly from its hooded suit, its dark eyes glowing. The mother was small and dark, too, the father paler, flushed red in the face. There was an older couple along, the woman’s parents, visiting from out of town.

“Fourteen quid for a single journey?” the young father kept saying. “That’s ridiculous. We could get a taxi for a tenner. We could get the bus. Why don’t we catch a bus? We could get the fifty-eight.”

The baby coughed. The mother glared straight ahead. Her parents milled about at a distance, keeping quiet.

“Fourteen quid,” the man said again, igniting an old feeling in me—a clutching feeling about money. I fished a twenty-pound note from my wallet for my ticket. It used to panic me to spend a bill like that. It used to trigger a personal indignation at the price of things. A quick shock in the morning that the twenty pounds was gone.
The run home from the tube station at Victoria after work, the sweat on my forehead as I imagined missing the free dinner. The inescapable mental calculations: This meal cost two hours of work; this skirt, a half a day; this journey on the tube, outside zone one, nearly an hour. This night of drinking, a half a day’s work. I used to go to pubs alone to drink. There are worse confessions in these pages, but the thread that came loose the night of your accident was first stitched into the fabric of my life in those pubs, and I wish it hadn’t been. I wish I hadn’t wasted that money, drinking pint after pint, and obliterated all those hours, and set down a habit that returned briefly, last summer, and inadvertently might have obliterated you.

Fourteen pounds for a single journey along the river? I didn’t like this pale man, but I had to agree with him that it was too much. They turned around without buying a ticket. I bought mine and boarded the boat. The rain had stopped, and the sun came out suddenly. The sky became pale gold. The sun glinted green off windows. It glinted off the river, too, flooding the city with an aching beauty. At the edge of the river were birch trees huddled in patches of dirt, the trunks like bleached bones strung upright in the light. They had missed it, this moment; perhaps it would have been worth their fourteen quid after all.

From the boat, I stared at river things: long houseboats painted black and brown or blue and white. The bleached, then blackened, brick of the Tower of London. The gray clouds moving swiftly overhead. Yellow brick tenements rising above the moss-green walls that contained the river and its tides, tides as far up as the point where the river ceases to be tidal and becomes an inland body unattached to the sea.

The next day, I took the Docklands Light Rail to Canary Wharf. I wondered who’d ended up engineering it—this massive station that connected the glittering new buildings to London proper. It
should have been Malcolm. It would have been Malcolm if he had not died. Standing there, I came face-to-face with the unwelcome finality of death. What can you do with it? It stops you cold when you think of it; it leaves you no out. So I took the light rail back into London and tried to put Malcolm out of my mind.

I walked the route I had sometimes walked from the river to Victoria. Each landmark was familiar: Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral, Victoria Station. I tried to find Victoria House, but the neighborhood was so changed, I did not see anything that looked like the building in which I had once lived. I walked back to Victoria Station. I stood inside its vast white halls. I watched a young woman standing alone before the board, looking up, holding on to her suitcase. The train schedule flipped over in its white letters. She could go anywhere. She could simply board a train and end up somewhere else. As I had done once, with Patrick.

It was not yet noon. I had all day. I’d be back by evening. Why not?

I bought a ticket and boarded the train. I spent the day walking around Canterbury, as Patrick and I had done. I tried to find the place we’d stayed. But all the bed-and-breakfasts looked the same. I did not spend the night this time. I took a train back to London to the hotel on Park Lane and collapsed into bed.

I went to the exhibit hall on Thursday, where a small room had been assigned to me for two days to assemble the arc light. I did not end up building an exact replica. The branch was faux, for one thing. The diamond bulbs the Swedish designer wanted me to use were yellow instead of clear glass, and for hoods, I had shipped over a half-dozen antique copper colanders, instead of the baking tins I’d used the first time. I worked for two days straight, and by Friday afternoon, I was done. I turned off the overhead lights and plugged in what I’d made, and the ceiling and the walls absorbed the new
pattern of light. The effect was startling, better than I’d hoped—and I sat for a long time taking it in. Then I was free to do whatever I wanted until the following morning, when the Swedish designer was to help me move the light into his exhibit.

I decided to walk back to my hotel. The exhibit hall was not far from Bond Street, and suddenly the area was very familiar. I wandered around until I found the street where I’d worked for Malcolm on the Docklands bid. It had gone upscale, with posh stores and little cafés, and the sandwich shop on the corner had become a Starbucks. I found the building and stood outside and looked up as dusk took hold. I felt that stopping again, the stopping of death, and I went on walking.