Blame: A Novel (16 page)

Okay, said Silver. We have to stop.

Silver’s face was set and closed. Did I say something wrong? Patsy asked.

Our time is up, Silver said firmly. We have to stop.

Patsy stared at her for a moment, grabbed her purse, and fled.

All week a thread of uneasiness wove through her days and led back to Silver’s sudden and shocking coldness, the abrupt way she ended their session.
We have to stop
. What had Patsy said to make Silver so cold? Had she been glib, or bragged, or somehow insulted the woman?

She went to meet with Knock-Knock and imagined the PO’s beleaguered, seen-it-all voice. It’s not working out with the therapist, Patsy. Or, You know, Patsy, you can’t steamroll a therapist. Or maybe Goldstone would wordlessly hand her a slip of paper with the name of another therapist.

In fact, the PO was in a light and distracted mood and hardly glanced at her meeting card. Sounds like you’re holding steady. Good. Keep on the way you’re keeping on, he said. See you in two weeks.

•

Her favorite thrift store, the Sunflower Shop, sold moth-nibbled cashmere twin sets and odd bits of old china, the life effluvia of the old Presbyterian ladies who ran it. Patsy bought a linen shift for a dollar, pumps in ice blue dupioni silk for seventy-five cents. Two boxes of Wedgwood Drabware china cost six dollars. The shapes were made from the same blanks as the company’s fine china, but, intended for the servants’ use, the glaze was the neutral gray-brown of cooked oatmeal. To Patsy, the Drabware was plain and vaguely punitive, but Brice collected the stuff. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have known about it. She lugged the boxes home in two trips. Brice shouted with pleasure. Oh my god! My god! Where did you find this? Look at this platter! And this coffeepot!

No, he couldn’t pay her back or give her anything.

This was how she wanted to be. Generous, surprising people with
pleasure. Her own happiness from this transaction carried her for an evening, until a twinge called her back to the lingering worry. That’s right, Silver. Our time is up. We have to stop.

•

She was surprised to hear Ian Sasaki’s raspy Southern drawl over the telephone. Of course she remembered him, she said, recalling his compact leanness, the shock of thick black hair, his handsome, angular face. Yes, she’d like to see a movie. Neither mentioned the girlfriend who’d called during the dinner at Sarah and Henry’s.

They met at the Esquire Theater east of the city college and watched an understated movie about a Texas oil executive trying to take over a small Scottish town. After, Ian took Patsy’s elbow and steered her into the soft blue summer night. They walked along Colorado Boulevard, past the college and shut shops. He was two inches shorter than she was, intense and self-contained, and comfortable—too comfortable—with silence.

Can you tell me what kind of work you make? she asked.

I used to make these large abstract polymer sculptures, he said. I had some good years, bought a house in Altadena.

His house, they figured out, was three blocks from hers, two north and one to the west. A knight’s move.

Despite all his success in polymer, he continued, or because of it, he’d decided to return to painting. He was making work about aquatic life. Fish.

Fish! she exclaimed. How funny.

Not realistic fish, he said. But they’re not exactly abstract either. I just hope they’re not cartoons.

He walked in silence for half a block. They may well be cartoons, he said.

Silence for another block. Patsy said, I suppose Sarah told you about me.

She said you teach together. You’ve been gone for a couple of years.

She told you where.

Yes, Ian said.

So no need for shocking disclosures.

No need. He brushed lightly against her then, and again some minutes
later. Then at intervals, each brush causing a pleasurable disturbance to her system. At Avalon Street she said, You’ve walked me home.

Swiftly he kissed her cheek, a whiff of turpentine, a flash of chrome-colored light behind her eyes. He walked away.

In bed that night, she recalled the brush of Ian’s arm and touched her own to revive the thrill of those collisions again and again, until she played it out. Then her thoughts rolled to dread and tomorrow, after work, Silver.

•

I got the feeling you were mad at me last week.

What gave you that impression?

You said, We have to stop. Like I said something to offend you.

Normally I say we have to stop when the time is up. As I recall, I was ending the session because our fifty minutes were up. But let’s go back. Can you remember what we were talking about?

I said I didn’t want to gossip. And how I didn’t want a social life. That I wanted to be a better person.

She’d also said that she didn’t want to get involved with anybody, but she didn’t want to remind Silver of that, because as soon as they were done talking about this, Patsy wanted to tell her about Ian.

Well, chances are good that whatever it was will come up again, Silver said. So let’s watch for it, and next time we’ll discuss it as it happens.

Patsy was impressed by Silver’s calm intelligence and heartened by the implied promise of the therapy continuing.

So I guess I should tell you that I met someone.

Ahh. Someone in particular?

A man, Patsy said. We met weeks ago but went to a movie last night.

Did you enjoy that?

Yes, but I don’t want to start thinking about him him him. I can’t be distracted by a man right now. But it’s been such a long time since I had any affection—let alone sex—it’s hard to resist. Not that there was any sex. But I can see where things are heading.

So maybe you want to take it slow. Not jump into anything.

Honestly, it already feels full speed ahead. Walking next to him and bumping into him—I got these big, full-body emotional rushes.

And that means?

You know. Chemistry.

Yes, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a choice.

What—to see him again or not?

Silver gave her a wry look. I meant, you don’t have to rush into anything or lose yourself if you choose not to. You can take things at your own pace.

So you think it’s okay for me to go ahead and get involved with him?

Is it okay with you?

I don’t know! I don’t even know this guy.

So get to know him a little before you decide anything.

How do you get to know someone when every time he brushes up against you, it’s a tidal wave of lust?

Silver smiled her small, sly smile. Now, doesn’t this seem like the perfect opportunity to figure that out?

•

In her dream, she ran down hallways with yellow lines and no doors, no end. She awoke, panting, before sunrise in her cool gray room, and rose, looked out her window. The world was colorless and still. It was Sunday, she would go to a noon meeting with Gilles. She made tea, lit a candle, pulled her books from a drawer. Today’s saint was Saint Vincent de Paul, parts of the entry underlined in her mother’s hand.
A mother mourned her imprisoned son. Vincent put on his chains and took his place at the oar, and gave him to his mother . . .

Oh, Mom, she said.

The sky was a whiter gray. Still, no sun had risen. There was a knock on her door—not Gilles’s quick gallop of fingers, but a sharp, peremptory rap. Patsy tied her kimono securely at the waist. Who is it? she said.

Jeffrey Goldstone.

He was going hiking, he said, and had thought to pay her a call en route. He stood in the living room in his orange Sheriff’s Department T-shirt, khaki shorts, and glowing white sport shoes.

Do I take you on a tour?

I’ll have a look around, if you don’t mind.

And if I did?

She trailed him into the kitchen, past the breakfast nook, where
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous
and
Lives of the Saints
were open by her lit candle. Jeffrey Goldstone took notes, sketched, moved on through the living room to her bedrooms, Patsy right behind him. The rooms suddenly seemed sparse to her, underfurnished.

A little messy, she said about her unmade bed, yesterday’s cotton dress on the bedroom chair, underpants she’d stepped out of on the floor.

No fugitive cowered in the closet. No needles were shoved under the bed. Yet her heart raced as if he were on the verge of such a discovery. What if she was doing something wrong and didn’t know?

In her breakfast nook, he touched the alabaster wall sconce. For my own curiosity, he said, can I ask what rent you pay?

Two hundred.

Not bad.

Her hands shook as she closed the door behind him.

•

Walking home from another movie, this one about a woman whistle-blower who gave up job and love to tell the truth, Patsy again asked Ian questions, gentle ones, such as females are tutored to ask, to indicate an interest. Did he like teaching? Who were his students? He seemed to find even such mild queries invasive. I do it for money, he said. College students.

So she scuffed alongside him in silence. After some blocks, he took her hand, effectively discouraging any further attempts at conversation. He’d be appalled, she thought, to know how intense her desire was. She herself was ashamed to feel so much with so little encouragement.

Ian stopped, pointed to a metal ammunition box in the window of a surplus store. Great verdigris on that, he said.

A wood-burning stove at the fireplace store drew his next comment. That would be good in my house, he said.

Emboldened, she pointed out a small oil painting in the Sunflower Thrift Shop window, a bouquet of lilies. Not bad, he said, but it’s so sun-damaged, you’d end up repainting the whole thing.

At the Lyster’s front steps, his swift kiss to the corner of her mouth left her with the afterimage of a bleached-out lily.

•

After the next movie, he did not hold her hand or kiss her.

I’m a history professor, with a Ph.D. I can’t believe I’m talking this way, Patsy told Silver. Like I’m in junior high. He loves me, he loves me not.

Do you love him?

I only meant
love
rhetorically, she said. I hardly know him. He hardly talks. He’s laconic, mum’s the word. You’d laugh to see us, a couple of mutes trundling along Colorado, bumping into each other accidentally on purpose.

How
do
you feel about him?

I don’t know. Drawn in. He’s so beautifully made, small and so intense.

And you like that?

I don’t know. I guess so, she said, thinking how even the most incipient forms of sex—brushing his shoulder, holding his hand, receiving his good-night peck—were momentous.

Gilles, her other confidant, said, They say drinking stalls you out, and when you sober up, you’re the same age emotionally as you were when you started drinking.

Which for her meant thirteen. Yes. That’s exactly how old she felt.

Saturday we’re going to an opening in Santa Monica, she told Gilles.

An opening! That means he’s showing you off.

Patsy wore the ivory shift dress and the blue silk-covered shoes. Ian said, Wow, when she opened the door, and blinked as if she were bright. She should’ve changed then, because at the opening, among the artists and students in their dark, severe clothes, she was the only person in pastels, and the shiny silk shoes revealed themselves for what they were, prosaic bridesmaid pumps devoid of style or irony.

Ian pushed her through the crowd, his hand at the small of her back. They couldn’t see the art for the crowd. Many people spoke to Ian, but he was brief, even curt in reply. He grabbed a glass of wine and pulled her outside again, where a sharp-featured woman in a dress with many zippers kissed him and talked intensely about the art school where they both taught. Unintroduced, Patsy stood to one side, ablaze in ivory and baby blue, the dress too scant in the cool ocean air and her sweater
locked in the car. A few cups of rotgut Chablis, she thought, would start to set things right.

Ready to go? Ian said. I sure am.

He knew how to get a small private upstairs room in a Little Tokyo restaurant, where once again the dress proved problematic, this time for sitting on the floor. She tucked her legs sideways, tugged constantly at the hem.

Ian held a lengthy, low-voiced consultation in Japanese with the waiter.

I didn’t know you spoke Japanese, she said.

I was asking if they had any whale.

Whale? she said. Who would ever eat whale?

You would. It’s the most delicious sushi of all.

Never, she said. Sushi had come into fashion while she was in prison; she’d had it only once before, at the home of a Japanese colleague, and a lot of rice—and sake—was involved.

A glass platter of halibut sashimi was set before them, the garnish a cucumber slivered to look like a chrysanthemum. In her mouth, the cool, translucent flesh repulsed her. Sorry, she said. I’m been living on sawdust, more or less. I’m only now getting used to real cheese again, and avocado.

He ordered miso soup for her, and a bowl of bright green steamed spinach, tea. He drank sake from a wooden box. The opening had stirred him up. He talked with contempt about a gallery owner who’d asked to see his paintings, and an artist who was a fake but was having enormous success.

Patsy pulled on her hem, listened. She apparently had missed an entire undercurrent of jockeying, hypocrisy, and insult at the opening. Ian laughed a little and said in his Southern drawl, And then there was you—

Me? What about me?

They were beside themselves, he said. I thought I was going to have to run interference on everyone gawking at your legs.

Sorry, she whispered, tugging on the dress.

Hey, don’t you apologize. Ian traced her ankle with his finger.

At the Lyster’s medieval wooden door, he wrapped his arms snugly around her and kissed her. His lips were firm, and he tasted, distantly and sourly, of alcohol.

Shall I come up? he asked.

Oh! Not tonight, she said, startled.

I can’t come up? he murmured, kissing her again.

She’d prepared herself for the usual peck and run, not this. She didn’t like him very much at the moment, after so much self-pity and ill will toward others, not to mention whales.