East Into Upper East (41 page)

Madeleine stood in the half-open door. Claire was still in Bobby's robe that she had thrown on and tied securely around herself. Madeleine wanted to tear this robe off her and expose the body inside—was it naked? She wanted to beat and batter it.

But when she spoke, it was quietly: “Ask him to stay.” She paused, gathered her strength, went on: “Tell him we want him to stay. We both want him to stay.”

“All right, I'll try . . . Why don't you come in?” She opened the door wider, and when Madeleine hesitated, she said, “He's asleep. He's all right now. He's fine.”

She encouraged Madeleine to enter and to approach the bed. Bobby was lying asleep in the middle of it. In the dimly shadowed darkness—for Claire too had drawn the curtains to keep the moonlight out—his naked torso appeared luminous, and so did the white sheet with which the rest of him was covered. His dark head lay sideways on the pillow; he had one hand lightly curled on his chest, which breathed up and down most peacefully.

“He's certainly nice-looking,” admitted Madeleine. “Isn't he?” proudly smiled Claire. The two of them were holding hands as they stood looking down at him, their attitudes almost reverent.

BROKEN PROMISES

“Reba's more the intellectual type,” Donna would say, whenever her friends talked about their own daughters. It wasn't strictly true, but how else to account for the fact that Reba had no visible boy friend and wore blue jeans and lumberjack shirts? If she was visiting when Donna had her friends in, Reba would sometimes open the door where they all were; and though they looked around at her and smiled and nodded so that their earrings swung and their coiffures swayed (some of them wore wigs), Reba didn't join them but quickly shut the door again. Then Donna would have to apologize—“Reading some book, I guess, she's always into them;” and her friends set their perfect pearly rows of teeth into a smile and complimented her, “Lovely girl,” and “You're lucky.” Nevertheless, Donna realized that her friends really pitied her: although their own daughters may also have had problems, these were normal ones, like ex-spouses who didn't pay child support or boy friends who wouldn't marry them.

But unlike her daughter, Donna's husband conformed to type, for Si had moved out of the apartment and in with his latest girl friend. Many of her friends were similarly situated, so they knew what it felt like and could be a comfort to each other. They always had plenty of good things to eat at their lunches, and each went to endless trouble when it was her turn: for what was there now except eating, and maybe keeping yourself nice with a new hair shade, or shopping for new clothes that only your friends of the same age and sex would even notice, let alone appreciate. All the same, there were frequent fallings-out among these friends, and then they wouldn't be speaking for months or even years.

Reba could never keep up with these relationships. Once, when
she had come to see her mother, Donna tried to get her to come to a show with her. Reba didn't want to and suggested, “Why don't you go with Celia or someone?”

“Celia!” Donna's face grew turkey-red under her golden hair. “I don't go to shows with snakes.”

Reba kept quiet. Her mother had high blood pressure and couldn't be allowed to work herself up. Besides, Reba knew about best friends turning overnight into snakes—for some remark they had made behind Donna's back, or preempting a favorite masseuse or upholsterer.

“Next you'll be sending me with that Foxy,” Donna went on, referring to another friend fallen from grace. “Anyway, I want to go with
you.
Nothing wrong in that, I hope: wanting to be with your own daughter . . . All right, dear,” she sighed next, “I know when I'm not wanted. Same as with your father.”

Reba said, “I have to go.” She slung on the cloth pouch in which she carried her possessions. “See you next week, I guess.” She pecked near her mother's cheek in her usual farewell, but this time Donna clung to her and said, “I can't take it any more, Reba; really I can't.”

“You have to,” Reba said. She spoke brusquely but stood perfectly still so her mother could hold on to her; and also if possible to give her some of her own strength and sturdiness. Donna was taller than Reba, but she was fat, soft, whereas Reba was muscular like a workman.

But after they parted, Reba took longer to recover than Donna. Driving her battered pick-up to the country where she lived, Reba couldn't stop thinking of her mother left to grow old alone in her luxurious apartment. But Donna, walking around that apartment, still crying a bit and wiping her tears, called a friend in the hospital and heard all about her operation, then called another friend to report on that and make a lunch date, had a little snack from the icebox, called the storage people about her furs, finally sat down with Lina her housekeeper for a cup of coffee and a forbidden cigarette. Later Si called—he did this practically every day and often she wished he wouldn't, but if he didn't, she got tense and had to take pills.

“Reba's been here,” she told him. “I'm worried about her.”

“Well, what do you think I am?”

This was their standard exchange about their daughter and led to Donna's next retort, which was bitter: “She should have had a better example from her father.”

Si said, “You want to talk to me or not?”

“I didn't call you, you called me.”

At the end of their conversation, Donna had to lie on the sofa for a while. Then she dialed Reba's number in the country. There was no reply, though Reba must have reached home by now. Maybe she was in one of her moods where she didn't pick up the phone, or she was wandering around in those goddamn woods she lived in. Donna let the phone ring and ring and was finally rewarded by Reba snatching it up and shouting “Hello!” in an angry voice.

Donna said straight off, “Your father's driving me nuts again.” She pretended not to hear Reba's groan.

“He doesn't look right, Reba. A man his age with a suntan like that on him—it's all done with lamps of course, but ever heard of skin cancer? And all that exercising at the spa, that's not going to do his heart any good.”

“I hadn't heard there's anything wrong with his heart.”

“There isn't, except it's rotten to the core.”

By the time she had finished talking to her daughter, it was dusk outside and quite dark inside, which Donna hated. She went around turning on all the lamps and overhead lights so that everything was brilliantly lit, her white and gold furniture, her tulips and tiger lilies from René the florist, Si's art collection on the walls. From her windows she could see the lights shining from unbroken rows of prime real estate, full of lawyers, developers, and psychiatrists. She imagined them all eating dinner inside their expensively decorated apartments, and that reminded her to call Reba again—“Do you have anything to eat up there? Well,” she defended herself against Reba's angry shout, “you don't usually, not anything I'd call
food
.”

Reba, who was vegetarian, wasn't about to get into that argument again; and besides, she didn't want to talk at all, she wanted to go on sitting in the dark. Unlike her mother, Reba loved being in the dark and delayed turning on the light in her little cabin till the last possible moment. In warm weather, she sat on her doorstep; all around her there was nothing but trees, with birds asleep inside them and the last little pool of daylight draining away in a gap between the branches.

Although her father was forever asking her to let him make her an allowance, Reba was entirely self-supporting. Several times a week
she stripped people's furniture or the walls of their houses to get them ready for painting. Her cabin was rent free, for though she may have lived there, as her mother always said, like a wild man in the woods, these woods were part of an estate owned by an investment banker and his friend. Reba was employed as the caretaker; she didn't have to do much but had a list of phone numbers for plumbers and electricians, in case anything went wrong in the big house. She rarely saw the owners—they mostly left notes for her on their hall table—and their house was invisible from her cabin, so that she really appeared to be living in solitude.

On Saturday night she drove as usual to the station to meet her friend Lisette arriving on the last train. Lisette couldn't come earlier because Saturday was a very busy day in the gourmet cheese store where she worked; and she was so exhausted from being on her feet all day that she was asleep before they got home to the cabin. Reba just picked her up and carried her to bed, tenderly lifting Lisette's long pale limbs to get her clothes off without waking her. Reba always associated Lisette with something out of a fairy tale—especially when she was asleep, with her long ginger hair spread on the pillow around her pointed little face. She was Reba's idea of the little Match Girl, or Cinderella before the Prince found her—someone pale and deprived who had to be taken care of.

Next day was a perfectly beautiful Sunday in early summer, and they had the whole place to themselves—the woods, meadows, ponds, and apple orchard—for the owners were away in the Bahamas where they had another estate. The leaves had that fresh look of translucent green that would grow heavy and dusty as the season matured; the lilac was out, so were pure white, sweetly fragrant clusters of bridal wreath. It had rained a lot in spring, so the grass was as moist and washed as the sky with its tufts of clouds. The swimming hole was full and the water uncluttered by the weeds that would infest it later; surrounded by trees and bushes, it was a completely private place, so they just stepped out of their clothes and dived in naked. It was cold inside, and Lisette—a pale shape flitting around in the dark green water—soon began to shiver; and Reba, though she herself didn't feel cold at all, made her get out and wrapped her in the big white towel she had brought for her. They sat at the water's edge, on stones embedded in moss, while Reba carefully dried each strand of Lisette's hair and kissed her damp shoulder where it
emerged from the towel. Then the mosquitoes came humming—Lisette was always their first victim, with her sweet blood, so Reba snatched up all their clothes and they ran as they were, two shimmering naked girls, to their cabin where they threw themselves on the bed and Reba went perfectly wild. They dropped into a deep sleep, in the middle of that warm afternoon, and when the phone rang, Reba—guessing it could only be Donna—didn't answer, and when it kept on ringing, put her hands over Lisette's ears so she wouldn't be disturbed.

On that same Sunday afternoon Si had come by to see Donna; he usually made time to do this, not liking her to be alone the whole weekend. She at once spoke about Reba: “Why can't she have a boy friend like everyone else.” Of course Si was the only person in the world she would say this to. She knew he felt the same, though he denied it. “It's okay,” he said. “Leave her alone. It's better than if she was with some jerk who wouldn't know how to treat her decently.” Next moment he could have bitten his tongue off, for—“Plenty of those around,” she took the opportunity to say.

He engrossed himself in looking at his paintings on the walls. Along with everything else in the apartment, he had left them behind when he moved out. But he loved them very much—for themselves, and also for what they proved about him, that he had learned to appreciate and spend his money on them. Donna never had learned, and in front of him, she derided them: “Looks like some kid of five's been messing around with a pot of paint.” What he didn't know was that, before her friends, she boasted how he had bought them when no one else had known their worth. She became very indignant if any friend made the remark about the kid of five, and then she explained the paintings; it would have made him smile to hear her, as he used to smile about her in the past, in appreciation of her charming, childish ways.

Donna fussed around noisily emptying ashtrays, and at last she said, “Who've you come to see, me or those pictures? Well, sit down then, you're making me nervous.”

He sat in one corner of a vast custom-made sofa; she sat opposite him on its twin. She stared at him and thought how unfair, my God.
He looked so good with his suntan, artificial or not, his body kept in check at the spa, his stylish clothes: a man only just past his prime. She was two years younger than he was, but sometimes, catching herself unawares in a mirror, she thought with a shock: “It's Gran.” Her grandmother had died of a stroke in her sixties; by that time all they would let her do was feed the chickens, and she walked around scattering grain for them and making clucking noises, her stockings fallen around her ankles.