Better Than This (8 page)

“I told you we’re just regular folks.”

“Yeah, right. And your grandfather was just a lumberjack.”

It was a joke between us. I’d always said her parents would be horrified if she brought somebody from the wrong side of the tracks home, like me. To which she’d always said she was going through a rebellious stage and she liked a bit of rough. In fact it was secretly less of a joke to me than it was to her. I hadn’t exactly been brought up in a slum but sometimes I felt as if I had.

“Remember,” Sally reminded me when we arrived. “My mom can be difficult until you get to know her.”

Her mother came out to meet us. She would have been in her mid-forties then and I remember thinking that if it was true that daughters end up looking like their mothers then I was in luck. Her hair showed no trace of grey, though she probably coloured it, but her skin still retained a youthful freshness, and she was as slim as her daughter. Sally introduced us and as we shook hands, though she smiled, her eyes remained cool as she silently appraised me. Sally looked on with what I realized was an expression of slight apprehension and it occurred to me she was hoping for her mother’s approval. All at once I was aware of subtle tensions in the air between mother and daughter. Uncertainly I made some remark about what a nice house they lived in. Ellen agreed that it was though a subtle undertone seemed to warn me that I shouldn’t get any ideas about getting comfortable.

Later that day she contrived to talk to me alone on the pretext of us getting to know one another.

“You must get Sally to introduce you to her friends while you’re here,” she said. We were in the sitting room which had large windows looking out the back where Sally’s father had his glass houses Frank had made a brief appearance before disappearing outside where I could now see him planting something. Sally had told me he was a lawyer with a practice in town, though his passion was growing exotic plants.

“Has she mentioned Garrison?” Ellen asked me.

“Garrison? I don’t think so,” I said.

“Really? I’m surprised. They were always such good friends.” She suggested we sit down and she asked if I would like tea. “Garrison’s father is Tom Hunt. Their family has lived in the area for generations,” she added.

“Maybe she mentioned him and I forgot.”

“He would be around your age. Aren’t you in your final year?”

That’s right.”

“I’m right then. So is Garrison. He’s going to be helping his father after he graduates. They have a lot of business interests in this area. Real estate, land and so on.” She poured tea for us and passed me a cup. “He’s a very good skier. Sally and he went together one year. A whole crowd of them went. One of the boy’s fathers has a lodge at Lake Tahoe. Do you ski, Nick?”

The smile she gave me was as pointed as a knife.

“No, I never have,” I said.

“Really? You’re from Portland didn’t Sally tell me?”

That’s right.”

“And what do your parents do?”

“My mother works as a personal assistant. My dad died when I was young.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she murmured.

It went on like that for a while. She quizzed me about my background while offering snippets of insight into Sally’s own life, subtly making a point about our differences it seemed to me. Later I asked Sally about Garrison Hunt whose name kept cropping up.

“He’s just somebody I know,” she said. “Why?”

“Because your mother keeps talking about him like he’s Mr. Fucking Perfect that’s why. Did you date this guy or something?”

She admitted that she had for a while, though it wasn’t serious. I got the impression that nevertheless her mother had decided he was the right one for her.

“She can be a bit of a snob sometimes,” Sally said with gross understatement.

She herself thought Garrison was pleasant, charming, and reasonably good looking, but he didn’t flip her switch.

We ate dinner with Sally’s parents that night. Her father didn’t say a lot. He was pleasant, but I got the impression his mind was elsewhere a lot of the time. I thought Sally was being particularly attentive to me. She made a point of holding my arm when we went through to the dining room. The room was large and obviously little used. The table was enormous, a heavily polished antique with twelve high-backed chairs placed around it which seemed ridiculous for the four of us. I didn’t know why we didn’t eat in the kitchen, which was large and comfortable, instead of in this cavernous room where by the time the food reached the table it was cold. Frank sat at one end, with Ellen on his right and Sally on his left with me beside her. Sally chattered with uncharacteristic nervousness, telling funny stories that presented me in a flattering light while her mother smiled with forced politeness.

“More potatoes, Nick?” Sally asked. “More wine?”

“Don’t you think he’s good looking?” I remember she asked her mother once, and kissed me quickly.

Her mother looked on with grim disapproval. I found Sally’s behaviour forced and unnatural, and wondered what point she was trying to make, and whether to me or her mother?

Later, when Sally was helping clear away, Ellen took the opportunity to collar me alone again.

“You and Sally have been seeing quite a lot of each other, haven’t you?” she said.

“I suppose we have.”

“You know, I married when I was quite young, Nick. Of course

I’ve been very fortunate and I’ve been happy, but I’ve always hoped Sally would experience more of life before she settled down. I’d like her to travel, to experience things.”

I wasn’t certain what she was getting at, but I was surprised at the inference. “Sally and I are dating,” I said. “We haven’t talked about anything like marriage.”

“No of course not,” she said with a laugh. She paused for a moment. “You’ll be finishing college next year you said? What will you do then?”

“I don’t know yet,” I admitted. “I haven’t any firm plans.”

“You’re taking a business degree aren’t you? If you like I might be able to introduce you to some people who could help you. I have some friends in Chicago.”

“Chicago?”

She smiled. “I know people there who run very large companies. I’m certain they’re always on the lookout for bright young people.”

I didn’t know whether to believe my ears. It seemed she was offering me a kind of unsubtle bribe to make sure I moved somewhere a long way away from her daughter. I said something to the effect that I would certainly remember her offer if I ever thought I was interested in moving to Chicago, and I think in that moment we understood each other.

That night as I lay awake in the dark there was a tap at my door. Before we’d arrived Sally had warned me we would have to sleep in separate rooms, which of course I’d expected, but when she crept down and slipped into bed with me I was glad to see her. I’d been thinking about her mother’s offer, smarting from the insult it implied that I wasn’t good enough for her daughter. When I told Sally she thought I must have misunderstood.

“Then what the hell was that performance over dinner all about?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Bullshit. I suppose I misunderstood when she kept talking about that Hunt guy you used to see and how he’s been asking after you.”

“Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

“This isn’t about jealousy, Sally.”

She must have realized then how I felt. “I’m sorry,” she whispered in my ear. “She’ll come around.”

“She’s not going to come around,” I told her.

“She will once she gets to know you properly. I warned you about her before we arrived.”

“You said she could be difficult to get along with. You didn’t tell me she was a class A bitch.”

“She just wants the best for me,” Sally said, a little hurt.

“The best being somebody else, like Garrison Hunt for instance.”

“It doesn’t matter what she wants. This is my life remember, and it’s you I’m here with now isn’t it?”

To make her point she slipped her hand down across my stomach and took hold of my flaccid penis. She pressed her body against me and whispered in my ear.

“I don’t want us to fight. Make love to me.”

I said, “Did you ever fuck this guy Hunt?”

“What?”

“You heard.”

Her hand retreated. “Do I ask about who you’ve slept with?”

I felt bad and wished I hadn’t asked. But some things we have little control over. “Did you?” I insisted.

She hesitated. “No. Satisfied?”

“Yes,” I answered, but in fact I knew she was lying. She couldn’t meet my eye, and to change the subject she took hold of me again.

The blind needs of the flesh, preprogrammed with a one track mind took precedence over quibbling issues of wounded pride. Sally squatted over me and lifted her nightdress over her head. Her body was pale in the darkness, the smooth curve of her hips drawing my eye to the plane of her stomach. She settled over me, drawing me into the folds of her flesh, then leaned forward to support herself, with her hair brushing my cheek.

“Forget about my mother,” she whispered.

I reached around and in one swift motion rolled her over. She looked up at me, startled by our sudden exchange of position, then she grinned. We began making love. Sally closed her eyes,

and a soft breath of air escaped her mouth. I whispered in her ear that she was beautiful, that I loved being with her like this.

She clung to me and softly moaned and I looked into her face at her closed eyes, the smile that played on her lips and I thought of her mother lying in bed somewhere on the floor above us who didn’t think I was good enough to be with her daughter, and I thought about Garrison Hunt too. A lot of old feelings welled up in me, things I hadn’t felt for a long time since we’d had to move from our old neighbourhood after my dad had died because we couldn’t afford to live there any more, and I’d slowly lost all my old friends. Sally moved beneath me, our bodies in rhythm. She rose towards a climax, arching her back a little and thrusting her hips, her arms tightening around me. The bed-head banged against the wall.

I whispered what I wanted her to say to me, but she shook her head, her eyes screwed tightly closed, so I stopped moving and withdrew from her a little. Her eyes flew open and she locked her thighs so tightly around me I thought she’d snap my spine like a stick. She dug her nails into my back.

“No,” she commanded.

“Say it then.”

She hesitated, then whispered, “Fuck me.”

I had an agenda here, but I had to admit that it was kind of exciting hearing her speak like that. Sally wasn’t ever a prude, but she wouldn’t normally talk that way. “I can’t hear you.”

I was straining against the pressure of her legs to keep myself apart from her.

“No don’t,” she said.

“Say it then.”

“I told you.”

“Louder.”

Suddenly with unexpected power she thrust her hips violently upwards.

“FUCK ME.”

It probably seemed louder than it actually was. Her voice reverberated through the silent house.

The next day at breakfast her mother fixed me with a withering stare and when it came time for us to leave she was nowhere to be seen. Sally was unusually quiet, and wouldn’t meet my eye. I regretted making her say what she did. It was childish and reeked of insecurity, and I knew Sally’s mother must have said something to her. She eventually admitted her mother had taken her aside and they had argued, but she would never tell me what had been said.

Perhaps Ellen had hoped our relationship would run its course, but after I’d gained my degree and started working she must have decided to leave nothing to chance. I found out that sometimes when Sally went home she went out with Garrison Hunt. She claimed it was to keep her mother off her back, and I could imagine there was some truth in that. Nevertheless we argued furiously about it, and when Sally claimed there was nothing I needed to be jealous about, I asked why she had kept it from me. She stopped seeing him after that, but once we met him when he was in Portland and she introduced us. Sally had always claimed he knew how things stood, and he was doing her a favour by taking her out sometimes, but I saw the look in his eye and recognized competition when I saw it. The guy was just waiting for his chance.

The year Sally graduated, we decided to get married. The ceremony was held in Sally’s home town. At the reception Ellen sat at the top table, her expression grim. A year after that, we moved to San Francisco.

The night of Alice’s exhibition Sally and I drove across the bridge to Sausalito. The exhibition was being held in a building that had once housed a boat building company, but no more apparently. It was at the far northern extreme of the town, away from the hugely expensive real estate that clings to the hillsides above the town, where in the evening the people who live there sit on their decks drinking martinis and admiring one of the most famous views in the world, of the Golden Gate Bridge and the forty-two hills of the San Francisco skyline. It’s a fact that in the Bay Area the wealthy live high up and breathe air often rarefied by the scent of obscene fortunes made in Silicon Valley. Whether Sausalito or Pacific Heights, Nob Hill, the slopes of Cow Hollow or the hills above Palo Alto at the beginning of the valley, nowhere else is the notion of getting to the top more literally interpreted. In these areas a modest three-bedroom home can set you back five million. Even across the bay the hills above Berkeley and Oakland reflect the same trend. Only options in a dot. com fortune will buy you entry to these suburbs nowadays.

Marcus and Alice lived in the less fashionable part of Sausalito, on the flat, tucked around the corner without a view, far from the pretty painted Victorians that house the waterfront restaurants and boutiques. The exhibition was held only a few minutes from their tiny cottage so I found it easily enough. A kid, no more than nineteen or so stood at the door self-importantly checking invitations, and by the time we arrived a small line had formed.

“Christ you’d think it was the city gallery,” I observed. Someone in front looked round.

“Keep your voice down,” Sally hissed.

There was a time she would have smothered a grin but these days it seemed like I couldn’t do anything right. Her admonition put me in a sour mood. I didn’t care if anybody heard me or not.