Blame: A Novel (17 page)

Ian, she said. We have to stop.

•

In the lobby, Gilles was reading a newspaper in one of those pitched-back hotel chairs. What are you doing down here? she said. Waiting up for me?

Oh, hello Patsy, he said, peering through his bangs. Is that what you wore?

I know, I know.

You look like you’re going to a Nazarene wedding. Where did you get those shoes? Ohmigod. Take them off right now.

Stop, Gilles. I can’t handle it. I am not cool. I never will be cool.

I grew up at openings, he said. I could’ve sent you off in style.

I hate men anyway, she said. Heterosexual men, I mean. What is their problem? They strut and posture and eat whale and don’t talk, except to rant. Then all of a sudden you’re supposed to make out with them?

Exactly, said Gilles. Shoes, please.

She stepped out of them, and Gilles left by the front door, the pumps dangling from his fingers. Patsy heard them hit the Dumpster. Boom, and boom.

Ian had two dogs, a black Lab-shepherd mix and a little orange terrier. His dark-shingled, one-bedroom cabin stank of turpentine. A high platform bed took up most of the living room. Like a monument, she thought, or a pyre.

He painted in the bedroom, he said, and motioned her to follow.

The windows were covered in foil, all the light was fluorescent. An easel, a metal stool, a filthy cart holding crumpled paint tubes were the only furnishings. Ian had used one whole wall to wipe his brushes on; the smears of color radiated outward like an explosion. Groups of canvases leaned, face-backward, against the opposite wall.

To see a house put to such irregular use! Not until he began turning the paintings around did there seem any reason for it. Then, fat tunas shone like battered silver bins, a school of anchovies flashed like dinner knives. A big, stupid-looking brown grouper drifted in pale green light outside his dark hole of a cave in a reef. The paint was a thick, luminous impasto. All the water, even the deepest blue-black depths, swelled with volume and light.

If we ever live together, Patsy thought, my house could be for sleeping, eating, our civilized life. She said, Do you put something in the paint to build it up like that?

Nah, he said. It’s solid mistakes.

They’re so strong yet childlike, she said, thinking that some were silly too.

He looked with brightened interest at his own work. What else?

Patsy talked off the top of her head. Playful. Dark. Existential.

Yes, yes. Pleased, he waited for her to say still more.

Fumes scorched the back of her throat. It’s like you’re painting the mind, she said.

Exactly, he said, yes, exactly. He looked at her with animation and grasped her wrist.

Patsy thought, We could sell both our houses and buy one in Sarah and Henry’s neighborhood, and make
our
ballroom into a giant studio. Desecrate the whole thing, top to bottom, with paint.

He led her to the living room and backed her onto the high bed. Pleasure sluiced through her chest and limbs in warm, fast currents. Alerted by their gasps and cries, the terrier stood by the bed and barked, and wouldn’t stop.

Afterward, they sat out on his back patio. He brought her a wineglass of berry juice, and pistachios in a black clay bowl. The old Lab mix curled at their feet. They ate the nuts, dropping the cupped shells into a rusty coffee can. The terrier snuffled under the oak trees. Patsy drifted, twitching with residual pleasure as her body settled. Shells clattered into the can. And then a shift, as if a sheet of glass slid down, a window shut.

Hey, she said.

He didn’t answer. Perhaps he didn’t hear. Oh, but he must have.

Hot shame spread through her, and she remembered the nakedness and noises and frantic arrangings, the long, sweet looks. Now he wanted her gone. She stood. I need a ride, she said.

He stood as well. No problem.

They drove in silence. Pulling up in front of the Lyster, he waited until she’d opened her door to speak. You know, Patsy, that this has nothing to do with you.

I don’t know that, she said, and closed the door.

•

Who did it have to do with, did you ask? said Silver.

No.

Why not?

He can’t handle direct questions. He finds them prying.

Are your questions prying?

To him.

And so you . . .

I don’t ask them.

They’d been too ardent, or she had. Whenever she thought of their lovemaking—her noises and tenderness—shame washed over her.

She didn’t need a lover, anyway. Not now.
Persevere in your good resolutions
, said
Lives of the Saints. It is not enough to begin well; you must so continue to the end.

But he called and asked her to a movie. They went back to sitting in the dark and intermittent, chaste hand-holding, as if nothing more had ever passed between them. A whiff of solvents from his clothes made her ache. When they reached the Lyster, he’d hug her briskly and leave. No more kisses. Once, he came up to see the apartment. She made twig tea. He soon handed her his mug. I hope you’re okay with things like this, he said.

My shrink thinks I should go slow too.

Slow, yes, he said. But slow still implies a destination.

Slow to wherever, she said, shrugging to match his indifference. Alone, she still recalled his intense, affectionate lovemaking and imagined revolving in and out of each other’s houses, Pomelo to Oleander Street—this could happen yet, she believed, if she didn’t scare him off.

•

The Mojave Club now shared the grounds and services of the Altadena Country Club, another old-fashioned privately run institution with its own dwindling membership. The adjacent golf course had long since gone public.

Gilles insisted they have dinner on the terrace to celebrate Brice’s new job. After working as a freelance producer on local commercials, Brice had been hired by the production company. They’d called that morning, and he’d already pre-spent a week’s salary on an expensive pair of sunglasses that he continued to wear long after the sun slid behind a dense screen of eucalyptus trees. They ordered cheeseburgers and Cokes. Brice, Patsy noted, had adapted his drinking to Gilles’s habits, as he once had adapted to hers. Their talk was punctuated by the pock of the tennis balls, the screams and splashes of children in the pool below.

God, look at those mountains, said Brice, who was always happiest when he had a real job, a fact he never remembered. Don’t you love it here, Patsy?

She smiled, but no, she didn’t. When the Mojave Club was at the grand old Bellwood, she’d been impressed and intimidated, but this small, local, members-only private club with its anti-intellectual, probusiness
Eisenhower parochialism was the culture that grew her. The world she fled for Berkeley. Around them, families were joined by fathers still in business suits from downtown offices and banks. She had her eye on the young father at a nearby table. With a plump two-year-old daughter on his knee, he ordered a second and a third double vodka rocks. His wife and children would leave, she knew, and hours later he would follow, perhaps to pass out on the sofa or dismantle the living room.

Well, well, well. To what do we owe this honor?

Why, Auntie, said Gilles.

Cal Sharp smiled down on them. Of course he would be here too. A club man, even yet. His Mojavian drinking adventures were AA legend—Round for the house, round for the house! One year, he’d told the meeting, his bar tab amounted to the median home price in Pasadena. Luckily, he’d owned the bar.

Brice, he said. Patsy. And shook their hands.

He ruffled Gilles’s hair, and Gilles’s eyes went soft with pleasure.

Sit down, join us, Auntie.

Now, Patsy, I’ve been meaning to ask you a question. Do you ride?

Me? Horses?

Sit down, Auntie, said Gilles. Don’t loom.

Yes, please, sit. Patsy touched the empty chair beside her. I used to ride, she said. The usual horse-crazy adolescent girl thing. Not so much recently.

Cal had horses that needed riding. His kids weren’t around, he couldn’t exercise the whole stable. Could she help him out, ride with him on Saturday?

Sure, she said, knowing that it wasn’t about helping him out. Cal looked for ways to encourage people, the ones who were new to sobriety or having a rough time. A kind comment. A free meal. A job he happened to know about. A horseback ride.

•

Patsy wondered how many other women had given Cinder a turn. A small, thin-legged bay mare, she had a pretty little canter and a nasty temper. She’s gone a bit spooky on us, said Cal. Watch out, she’ll shy at a stinkbug.

Cal rode a buckskin quarter horse gelding named Pliny. My sons call
him Plywood, he said. They’d started on a private bridle path that wended past the estates in Cal’s Flintridge neighborhood—his sprawling brick Tudor-style home on two acres was comparatively modest—then on up by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where they turned onto a public trail that led into the Arroyo Seco. Cal’s long-eared speckled spaniels boiled around the horses’s hooves. The day was hot, but the narrow canyon was shady, with the coolness of damp stone.

A year ago, when the wild buckwheat was drying to a dark iron red and the toyons were beading with green berries, she’d been digging fire lines on hills like these.

Cal took the lead in his fine-weave Panama hat and chambray shirt. He sat tall yet relaxed. Patsy had had enough riding instruction to know that such poise came from years of conscious practice, and she recalled Miss Becky’s bored barks:
Heels down, tummy in, shoulders back!
The muscles she’d built in fire camp did not serve her now. Within minutes her efforts at fine horsemanship exhausted her.

As Cal predicted, a dragonfly, its wings a coppery blur, provoked Cinder to a sickening sudden sideways veer. Ho now, Patsy said, and yanked the mare’s black mane. You cut that out. But a shadow set her off next, then a breeze, the wing flap of a blue jay. She always veered left, so Patsy knee-gripped and shifted right and got the hang of it soon enough.

Well done, said Cal when he saw.

She understood why men in the morning meeting flocked to Cal, why he sponsored so many of them, why they trailed him to Barkers and sat in attendance. He was so elegant, and easy in his own skin.

They came to a wide access road, and Cal waited for her to come alongside. You’re deep in thought, he said.

I was thinking about how you sponsor so many men.

Too many.

Really?

Some days, absolutely.

Really? But I’d like to do that someday—help people the way you do.

What’s stopping you now?

Oh, right, she said, thinking of her scant two years of prison sobriety, her parole.

Cal held Pliny close. You have a lot to offer, Patsy, he said. Especially to other intelligent, educated alcoholics. They’re some of the toughest
cases. The mechanism for recovery is so simple, it eludes them. You could do a lot of good.

Someday, maybe.

No time like the present, said Cal. Get yourself a passel of sponsees and you’ll forget you ever had any problems of your own.

I’m not as evolved as you are, she said. Not so good-natured. Or patient.

All a great deception, said Cal.

You can’t fake how you are, she said. I really admire you.

And I really admire you, he said.

She gave a little snort. Right.

Think about it, Patsy, Cal said, and steered the buckskin closer yet. You spent two years in terrible circumstances, really the worst, but here you are, working, sharing your experience, strength, and hope at meetings. It’s an inspiration to all of us, but especially to Gilles, who was having a terrible time before you came along.

Brice made the difference, she said.

Brice made some, said Cal. But now that Gilles is bringing you to the morning meetings, his own attendance is more consistent. And he’s happier for it. But my real point, Patsy, is that nobody would’ve thought twice if you’d transitioned through a halfway house or holed up with your family. Instead, you took a job, found your meetings, and jumped right back into life.

Cal’s generosity was like an open, sunlit field, and for a moment she saw herself as he did, as someone on a sure path.

Pliny’s proximity to Cinder was forcing the little bay into an erratic, nervous prance. Patsy pulled back on her reins. She needed Cal to move on.

They rode up the access road along a trickle of a stream, through a beech glade. Cinder stumbled at a passing goldfinch, the friendly bark of an Airedale. They came to a small waterfall and wide, shallow pool. Dismounting, they tied the horses to a shrubby oak and sat on flat gray granite boulders while the dogs stood up to their bellies in the water and scratched at submerged rocks.

You know who’s a superb rider? she said. Binx.

Is she one of the lady athletes?

The high jumper. She’d love it up here.

A Valkyrie, said Cal.

That’s a little gruesome, said Patsy. Valkyries haul the dead off battlefields.

Both those gals look like they could do some serious hauling.

I think Binx is beautiful, she said.

She’s the one with curly hair?

No.

On the ride back, Cal said he was going to grill steaks.

I can’t stay, said Patsy, who was going to a movie later with Ian.

They unsaddled at the barn. Patsy went up to the house to use the bathroom off the service porch. Coming out, she saw movement in the kitchen. Thinking Cal had come inside, she went to join him, and found Brice’s niece, Joey Hawthorne, pouring herself a glass of pink punch.

Hey you, said Patsy.

Patsy! Oh my god! What are you doing here?

I went riding with Cal.

Joey put down the jug and embraced her. Oh, it’s so good to see you. You went riding? she said. Cal didn’t put you on Cinder, did he? God, she’s a goon.

Not too bad, said Patsy. I liked her, actually. So what are you doing here?

I’m here for the summer, she said. Escaping the evil stepmother.

Brice told me your dad remarried.

Yeah, the hideous housekeeper. But oh! Joey cried. What about Brice! It’s just like you said, Patsy—he really does like boys.