Double Happiness (5 page)

The early morning caddies are backing the golf carts up the stiff slope of asphalt, out from the underground garage. I can
hear the whir and hum of the toy engines as they line them up against a white rail fence. Now the hills beyond the rails look oddly and abundantly sexual like the green-clad hips and thighs of reclining women.

I'm beginning to think this was a reckless trip, that Sonny won't be coming after all and even if he does it won't help, when a small girl darts across the putting green of the ninth hole. She is wearing a white sundress and a large white bow on top of her head. I can make out the wisp of a brown ponytail trailing out behind. She races around the sand trap and dives into the grove of trees. After a moment I catch a flash of white shimmering beneath the dark branches of the central bonsai.

Over the top of the hill a gold cart rises carrying a man in an orange golf shirt so bright I think he must expect lawless hunters to trickle down from the mountains to the greens. He, too, wheels around the trap and aims straight for the trees. A scar of dark mashed grass follows his progress until he disappears into the grove.

A burst of white crashes through the other side and the tiny girl is running up the tenth fairway, moving very fast for her size. She's halfway up when the golf cart exits the trees and starts to climb. She gains the top faster than seems possible, and I expect her to drop behind the horizon like a white stone tossed into water. Instead she turns and stares down at the cart. (I imagine the stare, I can't see her eyes. Are they blue?) Then she sits abruptly.

The cart keeps aiming right for her. I realize I don't want him to catch her, that I'm frightened. I'm afraid to watch his orange arm swoop out to grab her, and I almost call out—Run, run—even though I have no reason to think she's in danger. The man stops, and instead of some terrible reeling-in she just stands up, smiles, and climbs into the golf cart. They go over the ridge and then they're gone.

I stare out for a very long time half-hoping the little girl will return. I'm thinking maybe they'll just do a loop beyond the hill and then come back. I watch for so long that the sun tops the trees and some trick of morning light makes the trail the cart left fade back into the grass. I feel a sinking loneliness and drop into one of the deck chairs, suddenly very, very tired. I'm thinking about Cara. I've heard people talk about graceful deaths and beautiful deaths, and I've even heard that said about Cara's. It isn't true.

Somehow we all adjusted our vision to see the bald, rail-thin young woman as the same Cara with the sweet profile whose pretty skin in any light begged touching. We couldn't see what any stranger could have told us—and what the doctors, in fact, had been saying as plainly as they knew how.

My mother says, all the time, that Cara died an amazing death, but actually my mother was in the hospital cafeteria with Hal and Sonny when Cara died. Sonny asked who wanted a second cup of coffee. My mother said she wanted to see the card her friend Louise had sent, so I went back to Cara's room to get it.

I walked through the maze of green-tiled corridors in the oldest wing of New York Hospital. I thought Cara was asleep, as we'd left her, I pushed through her door slowly, on tiptoe. As soon as the light from the hall hit her bed she sat up and screamed something incomprehensible, but I knew from the terror in her eyes she was dying. Two nurses and a doctor flew through the door and pushed her down flat and started clamping something onto her already bruised arm while she struggled, and I started yelling, Get the fuck out of here! Leave her alone! until, to my shock, they did.

I stood alone in the middle of Cara's hospital room, which suddenly seemed gigantic, and listened to her breathing hard and shallow. I knew I should go to her and hold her but I was afraid to touch her. I said, Cara, it's okay. But nothing was okay, and I stood in the middle of the room and watched the life fall out of her body.

It wasn't until the signal on the monitor brought the doctors and nurses back that I wedged between them, circled around her bed, and touched her face—Cara's beautiful face, that wasn't beautiful at all anymore.

When we were small—when Cara was big enough to run but not yet in school—we played in our neighbor's woods. Later, a developer would come and arrange split-levels on a horseshoe road, but for some years Mr. McKim's vast five-acre wilderness abutted our own backyard. My mother was loose about
boundaries. Our town was a safe place, she thought, and we could be trusted to stay away from speeding cars.

Cara and I knew trails in the woods that led to different spots of interest: an odd mound of black dirt piled enormously high, and the orchard with its sour, knobby fruit on the other side of a thicket. I was bigger than Cara and could run faster. Sometimes I took off ahead into the woods until she lost sight of me and called out, Eeed? Eeed?

Some perversity in me would wait until I heard the edge of tears wobbling in her voice, Eeed? Only then would I tear back through the woods, running not on the trail but in the wild shortcuts, pushing through brambles and sticker burrs to get to her. I would land suddenly before her like a superhero and sweep her into my arms. I wasn't all that much taller than she— her legs dangled and her feet bumped my calves—but we would cling to each other ferociously for a moment as though we'd just had a very narrow escape. Then I'd put her down, and we'd continue as if nothing had happened. It was just something we did. Now I'm thinking it was a cruel game and a useless one, if games are meant to teach us. When she was really alone I failed to make a critical jump, like some skydiver stalled in an open hatch.

When I spot Sonny stepping lightly along the red stone path winding around the tenth green in the sunshine, I realize I've been crying again. I hate this about myself, crying all the time, and I know without a mirror that mascara has made two black
half-moons under my eyes, which look ghoulish. I lick my finger and try to rub away some of the stain as I watch Sonny, little by little, grow bigger on the path. I watch the funny rhythm of his step and the way his face tilts upward as he walks, as though he can absorb all this that he loves, if he can just open himself wide enough. His arms swing loosely at his side and anyone can see he's a happy man, or at least a good one. When I stand up from the white iron deck chair, the whole back of my dress is wet with dew. I pull the fabric away from my legs, walk to the edge of the terrace, wave my arm, and start down the long steep flight to the fairway.

A
PERFECT MORNING
. P
HILIP WATCHES
G
UNNER OVER
the top of new titanium reading glasses and wonders just how much it will cost to spray the apple trees. Gunner's got a squirrel trapped. Gunner has teeth like raisins but the squirrel doesn't know that and quivers, freezes on a low branch. A sweet pink blossom shakes to bursting right above its quaking noggin. Freedom just a scramble away. Philip laughs, stupid squirrel.

Philip made the drive to the New London Ferry from the Upper East Side in two and a quarter hours. Babied the Voyager out of the safety zone of seventy. At seventy-five the whole steering column starts to shimmy. At eighty, all is calm. On a good day, it takes Lucy over three hours. But he knows how to bob and weave. He can handle a tremor without freaking out. And here's his reward, the first, freshest cup of joe out of the dockside urn. Lucy thinks she'll make it up by dinner time. Their daughter, Edith, has a full day at school. His girls will play cards on the train.

Gunner is whining. Philip crushes his paper cup in one fist, shoots it into the open construction Dumpster in the drive. Come on, Killer. Gunner runs to him and laps at Philip's bare knees. Gunner really stinks. He's been rooting in the Hendersons's garbage again. Some green stuff coats his teeth. Philip gets a good grip on Gunner's collar. He keeps his nose away from Gunner's smelly breath. Gunner, Gunner, Philip growls and gives him a quick light whack between the ears, just a warning. Lucy would freak out if she saw it. But that's the problem with Gunner, he gets away with everything. And Philip feels helpless to change that because Gunner is old. Long ago, Lucy found him in a deserted lot below Canal Street, a little cocoa Labrador puppy with a broken hind leg—a beautiful baby hunting dog tossed out of someone's Mercedes for peeing on the seat. That's what Lucy said. And it was a story they stuck with. Philip gives Gunner a good rubdown with a paper napkin, disintegrated lettuce clots up Gunner's chocolate fur.

Can't help yourself, can you, he croons now. Philip is a softy: yes, his wife and daughter work him like a puppet. He likes this thought of being navigated by the females in his world. He dangles his hands puppet-style and lifts them mock unwillingly. You and me, boy, he says to Gunner, his unwilling hand yanking Gunner's choke collar. A pair of pushovers. The squirrel, of course, has vanished, out of the tree, out of the yard. And that irritates more than it should.

* * *

Back in the city it's all still there. The printers, the desks they built from salvage, the air conditioner, the partner's wife's blue bookcase and her odd, odd painting on the wall. What's gone, finally, is the partner, thank god. And that removal has cost five thousand dollars so far, on paper. Even though it's Fatty's, his own cousin's, law firm. Something they'd have to discuss. But the expense is ultimately a write-off. Even when the partner pays it.

And the office key will be delivered on Monday morning to Philip's personal bank officer by bonded courier. No pussyfooting around with FedEx. The bank officer was a nice touch. Here was a guy willing to freeze all the partnership assets on Philip's say so. There's a dispute, said Philip, and shazam. It was very satisfying and Fatty had been impressed. Three months ago, after Philip “resigned,” Fatty said: Go in every night, without fail. Don't break anything, but be sure he knows you've been there. Haunt him. Leave clues. If he changes the locks, we'll fuck him from here to Kansas. Fatty should be a fortune-teller!

Lucy's student served the papers for half the usual fee, glued the documents to the door with some kind of industrial adhesive that tore off the paint in strips.
And
shot the papers through the mail slot.
And
delivered them to the artist-wife's studio just in case his partner was loafing there. Obsessive student. Now Philip would have to spend an afternoon repainting the office door. But it was all worth it.

The idea of planting another student with a camera was fun, but too expensive. Lucy was for it, pleaded academic value, said: Just the type she'll be dealing with later on. Deadbeat, greedy ingrates. Users. The world is full of them. And she would know. Lucy teaches psychology at Columbia. But Philip calmed her down, saying, Let's not go overboard.

Sometimes Lucy likes to be excessive. When they finally closed on this house, Philip took the Jacuzzi out first thing. He could already picture careless bubbles slopping over the lip, seeping into the joists beneath the marble tiles. There'd be buckling in the subfloor and maybe mold. He'd have to tear the whole bathroom apart, better to nip it in the bud. He thought Lucy would freak out, but she didn't.

Okay, she yawned, You're the architect. A phrase his partner often used in jest. In mockery? Philip could never be sure. His partner had that Midwestern negative-space where a facial expression should be. They were both architects, after all. Even if Philip was senior in all ways. So when Lucy said this—You're the architect —out of the blue, and right in the beginning of all the trouble, Philip watched carefully as her eyes blinked and closed.

No. No sarcasm intended, as far as he could tell. Her face lay on a new satin pillowcase. Her mouth, glistening with Vitamin E, puffed out as if waiting for a kiss. He did kiss her
and she mewed in appreciation. He leaned over her shoulder, licked a finger and popped the wick on the jasmine candle.

Lucy would have liked a Jacuzzi, and the lily-of-the-valley bath salts she bought to celebrate still hovered near the place where the tub used to be. But Philip found the pinhole in the seal that would cause all the problems. And a client had some excess blue granite to sell cheap. Now a small stone wall—the kind so valuable around here when it traced pointlessly through a neighbor's wood—was temporarily erected between the toilet and the hole where the tub had been. Philip would lay it himself, a blue stone floor to offset the cool simplicity of white standard fixtures. Now the pink Jacuzzi, with its spun fiber-glass undercoat, lay tipped in the driveway like a seashell.

The portable phone rings from somewhere out in the yard, shrill and urgent. Finally he locates it under the picnic table. He'll kill Gunner, who'll know once and for all that the phone is not a toy. Philip lies down on the dew-soaked redwood bench and reaches into the grass beneath. His back gives warning tingles as he straightens up. Lucy's cell-phone number glows in the readout. He deliberates whether or not to answer. She doesn't like it when he drives so fast; he doesn't like to listen to lectures. He'll call her in a half hour to check in.

Philip carries the damp thing back up to the front porch where he'd put it in the first place, where Gunner now
naps in a pool of morning sunlight. Philip will read the paper later. He's tired of the paper. Tired of all the big questions. What ever happened to local politics? And what about lust? Katie at Kinko's hadn't flashed a thigh in weeks. The phone shrieks again. Gunner rolls over the porch ledge and gallops off toward the Hendersons's pond. Law- suit, Philip can see it now. Lucy's number glares again in the readout. She won't give up.

Yes, he says, snapping on the phone switch. Yes, a call-waiting yes, taking a disruptive call in the middle of something important. The yes that says: This is an expensive intrusion.

Lucy's voice falters for only a moment: Is that you, Kitty cat?