Better Than This (7 page)

I shut down the file I was working on and the Spectrum logo which I’d put on my desktop winked on and off. Before I closed down the screen I checked my schedule. I’d made a note months ago to remind me of an exhibition that Alice was holding the following night which until then I had totally forgotten about. Marcus and Alice had been living together for the past two years. She was an artist who worked from a studio he had built for her at the back of the cottage they shared in Sausalito. The idea of going to one of Alice’s exhibitions wouldn’t normally rate highly on a list of fun things to do but I thought maybe this was a chance to start mending fences. It had been a while since the four of us had done anything together, though there had been a time when we’d all go to a restaurant maybe once a month or so, or spend the occasional day out on the launch that Marcus owned. He’d always liked boats. In college he had a kayak. Sometimes he’d persuade me to go out with him and we’d paddle for miles on the grey Pacific in all kinds of weather, the sea sometimes choppy, the wind throwing spray in our faces, in winter the cold turning my hands blue. It didn’t matter to Marcus, he liked to be out on the water.

After he bought the launch, Sally and I used to spend weekends away with him and whoever was his girlfriend of the moment. We’d cruise down the coast and find some secluded bay to anchor where we’d swim and barbecue on the beach in the evening. When Alice came along we didn’t go so often. She and I had rubbed each other up the wrong way from the beginning. No question that she was a looker. Heads turned when she entered a room, and I was as struck with her Nordic beauty as the next guy would be. The problem was that I saw something in her eye the first time we met, and I soon realized it was a kind of disdain. It became apparent she considered herself unappreciated as far as her art was concerned. She thought the world turned on commerce and thought too highly of those who had the ability to make a buck, that people like herself were undervalued. That meant me. Forty-eight hours confined on a boat together was more than either of us could stand. Usually we ended up in some kind of argument that left Sally and Marcus looking on uncomfortably from the sidelines.

I went in search of Marcus. The office was deserted and I realized it was later than I’d thought, but I found Marcus still at his desk. He looked up when he sensed me in the doorway, and when he saw who it was he frowned a little.

Tjust saw a note about Alice’s exhibition,” I said. “I thought we might come along.”

He looked surprised. “You don’t need to do that.”

“I’d like to.”

“I thought you didn’t enjoy that kind of thing?”

It was true I didn’t, but I figured I could keep the peace for an evening. “It’s never too late to change is it?” I quipped. I don’t think he was sure what I intended him to read into that.

“I suppose,” he agreed uncertainly.

“Why don’t we have dinner afterwards, the four of us?”

I could see he was less than enthusiastic about the idea, but he thought it over and it was clear he couldn’t think of a way to turn me down. “I’ll mention it to Alice.”

“Great. It’ll be good to see her again.”

I went back to my desk and about ten minutes after that I saw him leave, and a half-hour later I decided to call it a day myself. I thought I was alone but when I turned out the lights at reception I saw a light was still on in the office so I went back to switch it off. It turned out that it was coming from Karen’s room, who besides myself was our only account manager. She was typing into her laptop, her expression concentrated, illuminated by her desk lamp.

“Working late?” I said.

She looked up with a start. “I didn’t hear you.”

“Sorry.” I gestured to the clock on the wall. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate your dedication, but don’t you have somewhere else you could be?”

She sat back in her chair and rubbed her neck. “I didn’t realize the time. I needed to get this done before tomorrow.”

I went over and looked at her screen. She was putting together a costing projection for a print ad campaign for one of our clients, along with reach and frequency rates for the target audience. All the usual stuff. Karen had worked for us for eighteen months. She was smart, good with people and pretty as well, but right then she looked tired.

“Why don’t you finish it in the morning,” I said. “Go home, have a glass of wine, put your feet up.”

She shook her head. “Can’t. I have a meeting at eight. Anyway it’s almost done.”

I felt guilty because for months now she’d been snowed under with extra work I’d pushed onto her to lighten my own load.

She looked at me as if she’d guessed what I was thinking. “If I was home I’d probably be working anyway. I didn’t have any plans. I’ll just be a little longer.”

“I’ll make it up to you, Karen.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” She smiled and went back to her laptop. It seemed like the list of people I had to make things up to was growing longer by the day.

Traffic was light on the freeway, and I was home by nine, which had to be the earliest in a long time. I could hear Sally’s voice from the kitchen so I went on through. At the door I paused when I realized she was talking on the phone and I caught the tail end of a conversation.

‘.. . guess people change, “she said heavily, then silence as whoever she was talking to replied.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do. It isn’t easy.”

More silence.

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I don’t know right now. Everything’s kind of confused.”

I froze with my hand on the door. Something about Sally’s tone struck a discordant note. Though I could only hear one side of the conversation and it could all have been perfectly innocent, I just knew that something wasn’t right. It was more the way Sally sounded than what she said, which was weary with resignation, as if she was at the end of the road, but there was a certain intimacy implied by what I’d heard as well. The way people sound when they’re speaking to somebody they’re close to. I wondered what wasn’t a good idea? And what was confused?

“I better go now. Yes. Okay, ‘bye.”

She hung up, and a second later I pasted a smile on my face and went into the room. Sally was standing by the counter, wearing a thoughtful, indefinable expression and biting her bottom lip the way she did when she had something important on her mind.

“Hi,” I said.

She did a double take. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

I went over and kissed her cheek, then I went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of white Zinfandel. I held up a glass. “You want one of these?”

She shook her head. “If you’re hungry I can make you something.”

“I already ate,” I said, which wasn’t true, but I had no appetite. “What did you have?”

“Oh, just a sandwich.”

I poured a glass of wine. “So who was that?”

“Who was what?”

“On the phone.”

“Oh. It was my mom.”

“How is she?”

Sally went over to the dishwasher and started unloading it. “She’s fine,” she answered with her back to me.

I kept watching her, wondering if I was imagining it or was she avoiding my eye. “So what else did she have to say?”

Sally threw me a quick glance. Normally if she’d told me her mother had called I could be expected to instantly lose interest. “Not much.”

“How’s your dad?”

She paused in the act of putting away a stack of plates. “He’s fine, Nick.”

I tried to remember exactly what Sally had said. It could have been her mother. They were close and always had been, though totally unlike one another, I was happy to say. Who else could it have been anyway? I asked myself.

Sally finished putting away the plates and faced me. “They want to come down for the weekend next week.”

I couldn’t disguise the sudden unpleasant surprise I experienced. We had lived almost our entire married lives in the Bay Area and in all that time Sally’s parents had never once visited us. It was an unwritten rule that Sally went to Oregon and stayed with them, which she did regularly, even frequently this last six or nine months. Very occasionally I went with her. But rarely, and usually only for a day or two. It was better for everyone that way.

“It’s only for a couple of days Nick,” she said tightly.

“Why are they coming?” I asked.

“Do they have to have a reason?”

“It’s just that they never have before.” I was getting on shaky ground here and I was well aware of it.

“Why are you always like this with my parents?” she demanded.

“It isn’t your parents.”

She glared at me. “Meaning?”

“Come on, Sally, I don’t have a problem with your dad, but you know as well as I do that your mother and I don’t exactly get on.”

“Well maybe it’s time you tried a little harder.”

“Well that’s great. Are you going to tell her that too?”

“I should have known this is how you’d react. You can’t even make an effort for once can you?”

“I can’t make an effort?” I said in disbelief. “For Christ’s sake, Sally, your mother can’t stand me. I don’t ever remember her making any kind of effort unless it was to try and stop you from marrying me.”

“Can’t you ever forget that? It was all a long time ago.” Grimly she turned and strode from the room.

Nothing could be guaranteed to start a fight quicker in our house than the subject of Sally’s mother. It was the one constant disharmony we’d always had to live with, and I knew well enough after all the time we’d been together that it was a fight I couldn’t win. No matter how justified I was in resenting the woman, no matter how much Sally had fought with Ellen herself, they were still mother and daughter. Over the years Ellen had gained the upper hand. Sally was like a prize, something we both coveted. In the beginning Ellen’s opposition to my relationship with her daughter had only driven Sally closer to me, but after we were married she subtly changed tack. She never pretended to like me, because Sally would have seen through that, but she made sure she kept her barbed comments and put downs mostly out of Sally’s earshot. I guess I’d never been as duplicitous and slowly Sally had come to believe that I was the bad guy. I went after her, adjusting my tone, talking to the back of her head.

“Look, you just took me by surprise. You have to admit they’ve never wanted to come here before.”

“Maybe that’s because they know they’re not welcome,” she snapped as she turned to face me.

I sensed there was more to it than Sally was letting on. She hadn’t been up there for a month or so and now the sudden turnaround.

“Did you have a fight with your mother?” I asked.

She gave a quick impatient shake of her head. “No. I’m going to take a bath.”

She started up the stairs, a flush of anger creeping up the back of her neck. I didn’t want her to go, for us to be like this again but I couldn’t think of anything to say to stop her.

I went back to the kitchen and poured myself another glass of wine. I was mulling over the impending joy of Sally’s parents visit, which made me think about the phone conversation I’d overheard. If Sally had been talking to her mother it hadn’t sounded as if they’d had a fight. She hadn’t been angry, more uncertain, or saddened. Maybe she was talking to her father, I reasoned, but that was unlikely. Frank didn’t get involved in emotional issues. He left family matters to his wife and the only thing he ever really talked about was his garden. Why wasn’t Sally going up to Oregon as usual? I kept seeing her expression when I’d asked who was on the phone, the quick, guarded flash in her eye, like somebody with a guilty secret.

When I went upstairs I hung up my trousers and sat on the bed to unbutton my shirt. The pillow was inviting. I wanted to lie down and close my eyes. Sally emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam. She opened her closet door, then with her back to me she unfastened her robe before bending over and stepping into a pair of panties. She let the robe fall to the ground and reached for a nightdress. At the brief sight of her partial nakedness I felt a twitch in my loins. The curve of her spine formed a hollow in the small of her back above her buttocks. She was in good shape, her body taut from the rigorous programme of Pilates exercises she’d begun almost a year ago, in preparation for when she had a baby, she told me at the time, adding pointedly under her breath, if she ever did. When she turned in profile I glimpsed the upward tilt of her breast, the pink tip of a nipple.

A fleeting vision of an occasion when we’d once made love in a wood on vacation several years back flashed before me. The sun was slanting down through the high green canopy, like columns of light in a vast airy cathedral. The warmth of the ground rose up to us carrying with it the sweet loamy smell of earth and leaves which was somehow seductive. I remembered it was warm and the feeling of damp hair, and a trickle of moisture running between Sally’s shoulder blades which tasted salty on my tongue.

Just then Sally glanced over and caught me watching her. She couldn’t miss the erection in my shorts, and for about a millisecond she hesitated, unsure how to react. Then she looked away.

I was nervous the first time Sally took me home to meet her parents. I knew her grandfather had made a fortune in lumber, and that she had grown up in a large white three-storey house surrounded by six acres of grounds that was a far cry from the city neighbourhood I called home. Her grandfather, however, made a series of bad investments, a trend continued by her father in his younger years before he’d married Ellen. By the time I met Sally her parents were no longer rich, though that had never stopped

Ellen from harbouring hopes that her daughter might be the one to restore the family fortune.

I was in my final year at college when we drove through the gates and along the drive that led to her family home. We’d been dating for six months by then, and the view I had of the house matched with the impressions I’d formed listening to Sally’s stories about her childhood growing up in the small town she was from. I’d conjured an image of slightly decayed grandeur, which was borne out by signs that the cost of upkeep had become too steep. The house needed painting, and some re pointing work on the chimneys needed doing, the grounds were unkempt except where the lawns were maintained. Sally grinned.