Blame: A Novel (25 page)

As he left, Lewis touched Patsy’s elbow. I heard your husband speak at a retreat last July. Now, there’s a man with a beautiful soul.

The next morning, Lewis phoned Burt’s house on the off chance Patsy was still there. He wanted her to speak that night at his AA meeting. A speaker had canceled.

She brought along her father, Burt, and Umparro, who had never heard her story. Afterward they all went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant. That was when she found out the fiddle player was neither Lewis’s wife nor lover, but an old friend whose child, the red-haired Susannah, was his goddaughter.

Within the week, Lewis wrote Patsy a charming note in dark gray ink to thank her for speaking.

Your story was so moving and powerful. We’re all still ringing from it.

When Patsy heard Hallen was looking for a French-language adjunct for the winter quarter, she phoned Lewis, then talked him up to the language chair, who hired him to teach French 2, a bore. But comp lit asked him to teach the Russian short story as well, which made the hundred-mile commute worthwhile.

Patsy showed him around the Hallen campus, with its Mission Revival architecture, olive, oak, and eucalyptus groves. They split a sandwich at the student union. That weekend she brought him to the faculty picnic—Cal had long since bowed out of those—and they spent the whole two hours talking on Wes Gustafson’s sofa.

He’d had one bad novel published—No, seriously, Patsy, it really is an embarrassment—and had started work on something else, about the drunk farm where he’d sobered up and the man who ran it, his first sponsor.

It’s part memoir, part biography, he said. Which reminds me. For my research, I’d like to talk to your husband about how he runs his house.

His house? said Patsy.

Don’t you have some kind of unofficial halfway facility down there?

No. A few boarders now and then, said Patsy. None if I can help it. It’s not a
facility
.

She was already loath to bring him home. Lewis had idolized his former sponsor, the one he was writing about; he’d be just as susceptible to Cal, and Patsy didn’t want to share.

•

Patsy had long been looking for a new house—Cal being content in the Tudor—when six years ago, on a meandering trail ride together in the foothills, they’d come across a weedy four-acre spread. Built in the sixties by an industrialist, the eight-bedroom redwood-sided ranch house was modeled—loosely—on the famous home in a TV western. There was also a separate apartment that the selling agent called “the possum trot,” a cactus garden, lily pond, wrecked pool, falling-down pool house, and barn. Having languished on the market for years, the place went for a song, with escrow closing on the Sharps’ tenth wedding anniversary. All along, they swore they’d ditch the name, but they’d already gotten into the jokey habit of using it. The Ponderosa. The Pondo.

The move had given them both a burst of energy; she painted rooms
and furnished under Brice’s strict supervision. Cal rebuilt the barn, put in a pipe corral and hay shelter. Antonia, Patsy’s former prison chum turned landscaper, restructured the gardens and stocked the lily pond with expensive koi, to the delectation of local raccoons. The canyon contained forty oak trees, plus citrus, loquats, persimmons, black figs, and a variety of purple-skinned avocados with oily, delicious flesh. They harvested in laundry baskets.

Cal’s kids and sponsees cycled in and out, especially March. Brice rented the possum trot for two years after the Lyster sold, though
rented
wasn’t exactly accurate; some combination of bartered for and squatted in was closer to the truth. Lewis must have heard about the six months Burt lived with them after his divorce, for that in particular was a period of great conviviality. Boarders lounged around the living room as if it were the lobby in some rustic mountain lodge; they built eucalyptus wood fires in the gaping river rock fireplace, read, talked, napped. People took turns churning out dinners—Burt, at loose ends and on stress leave from his job, had cooked often. Someone would ring the rusty iron triangle hung from a porch rafter, and everyone would gather in the dining room, with its exposed log truss and chandeliers of tangled antlers. Cal and Peggy’s daily wedding china (place settings for twelve) was often augmented with the picnic Melmac, depending on how many girlfriends, boyfriends, and other drop-ins crowded around the table, with Cal always at the head.

Patsy was spending long days in research libraries by that time, only sometimes showing up at the dinners; even then she might grab a bowl of stew or piece of chicken to eat in her office. She didn’t begrudge Cal the company he needed, and he, in turn, didn’t begrudge her the time and solitude for her work.

Since Burt’s tenancy, things at the Pondo had quieted down. March had married, moved to Sunnyvale with her younger dot-com husband, and given birth to Ava. Brice, after another fling with high-paid commercial production, was house-sitting to get by. Now, only two AA newcomers bunked in the east wing, although Stan was splitting up with his wife and would no doubt move home.

Patsy had never once thought of the Pondo as
a halfway facility
. Her term for all the hubbub and moochers and revolving stepchildren was
upscale crash pad
.

•

The first time Lewis phoned her, he had a pretext, an annoying bit of Hallen red tape about parking on campus. They talked for an hour. She found her own pretext two nights later—would he speak at her Friday meeting?—and this time they stayed on for two hours, she on the sofa in her home office, wrapped in the old rag, he fifty miles away in his bungalow in the orange groves near Rito.

They started meeting for lunch between classes, and later, when they were done teaching, took brisk walks into the hills above Hallen, Patsy’s exercise on teaching days. They swapped books, discussed them, adjusted each other’s tastes—Really, Tolstoy was in a different league from Turgenev, he said; her attachment to
Fathers and Sons
might not withstand an adult reading.

Didn’t he know that Hofstadter, as lucid and elegant a writer as he was, was already old guard; he should try Susman, her favorite.

Patsy had finished her second book,
Raised Up
, a study of Hull House graduates, and was researching her third, a more literary effort,
Situated Women: Gender, Geography, and Possibility in the Novels of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather
.

Lewis had never read Cather. He was a quick study, though: two, three books a week.
Death Comes for the Archbishop
, he said, knocked him out.

A crush. Her friends had all had one or more. Sarah was in agony for months over the new Asian studies professor, and Margaret, a colleague who taught at Pitzer, had fallen for a nineteen-year-old poli-sci student, female. But one didn’t act on such feelings. One suffered, deliciously. And took it out on unsuspecting husbands, who were the real beneficiaries. Crushes brightened the days, restructured the weeks, rein-vigorated the nights. Gave those droopy old marriages an infusion of starch.

You have a cruh-ush, Sarah sang.

He sounds yummy, said Margaret.

Patsy considered her situation of a different order. She and Lewis were a true match, both chatterers, debaters, always brimming over with yet more to say. Not only were they both sober, their sympathies were unusually alike: each took a panel of AA members to talk to prisoners
once a month. Patsy went with Gloria out to Corona. Lewis took a gang from his old drunk farm to the Acton honor farm.

•

Patsy wished Silver were around to talk, and maybe to regulate her a little. But after they’d worked together for fourteen years, Silver had retired and moved to Tucson, Arizona.

It occurred to Patsy that this business with Lewis might be her post-therapy acting out. Now that she wasn’t giving a weekly account of her life to someone, it was time for a little regression, and fun.

Waiting for him to finish class and rid himself of lingering students, with their questions about the essay, the midterm, and if they could do extra credit, Patsy sat at her desk with her back to her door and gazed out at Hallen’s new red clay track, where hammer throwers, shot-putters, and hurdlers trained. She’d turn at his quick knock and see his thin, jagged face, still lit and amused by some undergraduate’s take on the Russians—“The Darling” was just codependent, or “The Nose” was like the dating process.

Let’s go, Lewis would say. They’d stride into the hills behind Hallen, through the neighborhoods of big, theatrical homes with walled gardens and old trees. One night they walked as far as Audrey’s old house, three miles. Strangers lived there now, but Gilles’s gritty ashes moldered under the great ficus tree.

Lewis wore jeans and pressed shirts and big pullover sweaters that hung well on him. He had a slim, lanky body and that easy feline swagger. In fact, all his clothes looked good on him, except perhaps his loafers, which were too pointy and down at the heel; he’d bought them in Italy three years before.

His hair was iron-colored and curly, his hands and arms expressive. He talked with a chronic intensity that Patsy couldn’t get enough of, and often he slid his long fingers into his curls and gave his head a good scratch, as if to stimulate fresh thought. She found him wonderfully appealing, handsome, and heartbreaking. What was he doing roaming strange neighborhoods with a married woman?

They waited forty-five minutes in a crowd of students and young families for thin-crusted eggplant and jalapeño pizza at Casa Bianca. They drove into Pasadena to eat boysenberry pie with overlarge scoops
of vanilla ice cream at Pie ’N Burger—she would’ve enjoyed it more if a man she knew from meetings wasn’t a few seats down and watching them. She saw how the two of them must look, chattering face-to-face, with Lewis tapping the Formica countertop to make a point and leaning into her, cajoling her to agree.

•

On the days they didn’t see each other—that is, most days—they talked on the phone, often for hours, which she hadn’t done with a man, ever. They were both good at talking about themselves—lots of practice in AA—and revealed their checkered pasts with good-natured oneupmanship. She’d finished her coursework at twenty-six, before her drinking got too out of hand, whereas he, at twenty-six, had been working in a car parts store, failing to keep current with a mounting cocaine debt, and wouldn’t even start his coursework for another year.

He too had woken up from a blackout to find himself in custody—in his case, in the rubber room of a county detox, with no idea how he got there.

That’s the thing, said Patsy. I didn’t know why I’d been arrested either. They wouldn’t tell me. Then a detective started reading the homicide report.

That sounds sadistic.

They were pretty mad at me, said Patsy. And for good reason.

You don’t remember anything about the actual accident? said Lewis.

No, she said. I thought I remembered something, but when the husband came to see me in prison, I found out I had it all wrong. I’d imagined long hair, and uniforms, like Salvation Army members.

Patsy tucked the old rag more tightly around her. Actually, when I talked to your meeting, she said, I didn’t mention that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses. I stopped saying that because once, at a big Hollywood meeting, I said, I swung too fast into my driveway and hit two Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the whole room burst out laughing, as if I’d told a joke.

Ouch, he said.

Yeah. Patsy was silent, recalling her dismay when the people kept laughing as she’d tried to set them straight.

We don’t have to talk about this, Lewis said.

I don’t mind, she said. In fact, it had been a long time since she’d
spoken in any detail about the accident or prison; she used to talk to Silver about those things, and there’d been times with Cal, early on in the marriage, when she was haunted and couldn’t sleep, but not recently.

I’ve only been to jail twice, Lewis said, and never for more than a day. But I rank it among the worst experiences I’ve ever had. How did you get through all those years intact?

Who says I’m through? said Patsy. Or intact?

Yes, but you’ve obviously moved on.

From prison itself, to some extent maybe. But I think of
them
every day. The mother and daughter. I’m involved, still, with the father and boy. I go to the kid’s recitals. I help with his schooling, we give each other birthday presents. They’re my other, secret family.

Yes, and look at you. Even with all that, you’ve been so productive—all your books and teaching and running that big house.

Just two books, so far. And I’ve been lucky, Lewis, she said. That man whose family I killed happened to be an exceptional human being. He forgave me right away. I’d be nowhere without his generosity. And when I got out of prison and was so sad and lost, Cal took me in and gave me this privileged, stable, secure life. And for the record,
he
runs the Pondo. I have nothing to do with it. You go to him if you want a room or need a month’s grace on your phone bill. He’s the one who tells the housekeepers to make a vat of soup. He keeps the troops happy. Me, I’d kick ’em all out today, every one, for five minutes of peace and quiet.

•

At night, when Cal was already asleep, they delivered themselves to each other in sentences. How they’d lived before, how they lived now, what happened in between. Lewis was chronically single, he said; his last love was a minister who became too involved with her congregation and had no time for him. Patsy was careful when she spoke of Cal; she never complained that he was growing old or slowing up, or that she’d never had a conversation with him remotely like those she and Lewis now had on a daily basis. She groused mildly about Cal’s generic tolerance—You should meet some of the strays he brings home!—and his habit, after thirty-odd years, of attending AA every day. She and Lewis were both down to one or two meetings a week and the monthly panels they took to their respective prisons.

They talked until it was a fight to stay awake. They signed off, and the next night, picked up where they left off.