My Hollywood (16 page)

Claire
THE POX

“Yup, you got ’em, my friend,” Paul said. “The Pox.” He gathered his baseball cap and jacket and gave Will high five.

It had been a normal morning, threads of music bobbing in the air, and now I was out for the day. I stood on hold with the doctor’s office as Paul walked backward, making a pratfall. Still, there was a certain relief, stepping into the bright winter morning, the clouds majestic, western above the sharp line of mountains. The air sparkled, and I became a citizen, with manageable duties. We walked to the doctor’s office, past a florist setting out potted daffodils. This was easier than composing.

I listened to the doctor, steadied by orders. Anyone could see me in the pharmacy, prescription in one hand, Will in the other. But I was thinking of Jeff, in his baggy white shirt, his straight arms caging me against an outside brick wall.

Did an affair have a moment when it was still innocent? How would I know? I had to believe a guy like that would turn out to be a nightmare. But what was the difference? The decent guy left you alone with a sick kid anyway.

The pharmacy carried two brands of bath powder. Paul had just signed a contract; I threw both in the basket. I paid ten dollars for a clay pot of daffodils, innocent as nuns. After his oatmeal bath, Will ran a silver train car over his bedspread while I dabbed the dull ointment on each pox. Lola burst in with a package of cotton gloves and fought them onto his hands. “So he will not scratch, Claire. That will scar!”

We took out every toy in his room and played until its magic drained. A watery breeze lifted the curtains and time bent. I thought of old church music, the modal scales. Maybe while he slept, I’d work. I remembered the way Jeff had looked at me. Was this odd sugarhouse I was building still okay?

That night, I woke on top of the covers, a rustling in the closet. Paul looked caught, with a stack of blankets. “I’ve got to sleep in the den. I just can’t catch this. We have a table read tomorrow.”

“I’m worried about work too. I didn’t get anything done today.”

He sighed. “At least you don’t have a deadline.”

I never did anymore. At 2:00 a.m., I ran another oatmeal bath to soothe Will’s ragged itching. Buttoned into clean pajamas, he fell asleep again.

Days later, when we found ourselves dropped back into the regular world, my upstairs room looked dusty. There was my music. Just paper. I sat down at the piano and touched a sour A. I should have called the piano tuner while I was out. I’d have to call him now. But instead, I called Paul.

“Got to call you back,” he said.

“When?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and hung up.

Paul liked classical music but he didn’t listen to it. He said he needed concentration and he was so exhausted that it tended, as reading did, to put him to sleep. Most musicians I knew had married other musicians. I was beginning to see why.

I fumbled at the phone.

“Helen’s at Pilates,” Jeff said right away.

“Actually, I wanted to take you to my jewelers. Valentine’s Day’s this week.”

“It is? God, that’s bad news. Let me think about it. Can we keep this a secret?”

I repeated his little speech to Lil.

She laughed. “The keeping it secret part. Sounds like code to me.” We were middle-aged women with small children. We needed to laugh.

But if Paul didn’t require music, he still saw a slash of brilliance in me. That gave me a feeling of safety, going to sleep in the still house. He’d once memorized parts from my two CDs, and he could hum them the way he whistled Top 40 tunes, getting dressed in the morning. And when those two-musician couples had children, their kitchen walls thickened with grime.

I could still talk myself into our life.

On a Sunday evening in March, Jeff came over and lay on the floor of our small living room. “You can marry a wife or a housekeeper,” he said, an arm stretching to grab a chair leg. Paul paced, tapping his pen on the legal pad. Since his show aired, Paul felt more his equal.

Wife or housekeeper: Which was I?

The doorbell rang. Helen, wearing cute glasses. “I need to talk to Lola a minute.” She went out back, without explaining. Lola had just returned from their house. When Helen passed through again, Paul asked, “So what’s up?”

“Oh, God.” Helen rolled her eyes. “Lucy stood in front of me; I can always tell when she wants something, she lines her breasts up with mine and looks down at the ground. ‘Helen, there is something I need to talk to you.’”

“The ‘something’ turned out to be a cleaning woman,” Jeff said, from the floor.

“‘Now he is so actif, Helen. I really have to watch him every minute.’” She imitated Lucy’s voice. “So I asked Lola. ‘Bing has to come first,’ she said. She had this little smile inside her smile.”

“Bet she did,” Paul said. What did he think? It was us against them?

I imagined the household I could run with Jeff’s money.

“Thanks, bud,” Paul said. “Wonder how long it’ll be before Lola’s asking us.”

“Hey, man, Helen’s the general. I’m just the foot soldier.”

But the general of what?

I liked baking and dresses. One from the housekeeper column, one from the wife. Helen left, and the guys went back to work. Jeff came into the kitchen asking for something to eat just as I was taking a tray of Japanese purple yams out of the oven. (Housekeeper.) I fixed a plate for Will.

“Thank you for caring about my hunger,” Jeff said when I gave him a bowl. “I didn’t think I’d get any of this—the wife, the child, a home.”

“Have the father of the autistic kid say that.”

“That’s good.” Jeff called to Paul, “She’s good.”

I heard them laughing, late into the night. I fell asleep to that sound.

In the end, we hired Ofelia too, for a half day every week, to clean our house, even though Will would be starting preschool in the fall.

“Keeping up with the Filipinas,” Paul said.

Every Friday, Ofelia came to our rental house, carrying her own vacuum cleaner, the corrugated trunk over her shoulders. At the end of the afternoon, Lola would leave for the other house, and Ofelia dandled Will on the floor with her odd words of English, waiting for her husband to pick her up. From upstairs, I’d hear a toot, run down, scoop Will in my arms, and stand barefoot waving goodbye to the family in the huffing, chugging car, remembering Jeff hold forth at the Ivy, “You know how they could really clean up the air in Los Angeles? Just get rid of all the cars more than ten years old. Make ’em illegal.”

One of the large, unsolved riddles in my life was how I could love people I didn’t respect more. “Drive safely,” I called out, weakly, weekly.

My mother, a lifelong beauty, at seventy still wore high heels. She claimed flat shoes hurt her feet. In a white pantsuit, a white hat, and white four-inch-high espadrilles, she brought over a gosling. “When I was little we used to get baby chicks in different colors; they shot dye into the egg.” She lifted the infant bird carefully out of its box. “With a long needle.” It quivered, adorable, soft yellow.

We took pictures of the gosling in Will’s cupped hands.

“Do you want to stay for dinner?” I asked.

They had to go, though. “Rhododendron Society meeting,” Tom said.

But the gosling made noises in the night. So I moved it, in its box, from his room to ours. “Claire,” Paul called, “could you please come here!” He stood, a towel wrapped around his waist, just out of the shower, wiping his heel with a Kleenex. “I stepped in bird excrement. In our bedroom. That thing has to go.”

I waited until ten to call her. “Two incontinent beings in the house are too many.”

“Well, he won’t be that way forever. But I’ll come get him. I can take him here.”

“You’re going to raise a goose in your apartment?”

“Sure. Why not? He can live in the upstairs bathroom.”

After I hung up, Lola said, “Why you not put it outside? A goose is like a watchdog. In the Philippines, we always get a goose near Easter and the kids chase it around the yard until one day,
qweek
, into the pot.”

Tom and my mother arrived that afternoon, my mother in olive green. Tom wore his usual khakis and the same striped shirt.

“I’m going to take her to Twin Dragons,” Tom said, “but, geez, she drives me crazy. She orders the steamed snow peas with no sauce and then when they come she complains they’re not hot enough. But the sauce is what keeps in the heat.”

“He’ll still be your goose,” my mother called to Will, as she directed Tom to carry the box to the backseat of his car.

Jeff called at the beginning of April. “I guess it’s past Valentine’s, but you think we could go to that place?”

I showered. Blow-dried. I tore another pair of pants off the hanger. Had all my clothes gone out of style? Was this flutter necessary, for a thrill? I didn’t know if I had the stomach for it.

The phone rang as I was trying to put on makeup I’d bought more than a year ago, and I knocked over the little bottle of foundation, which I’d already “feathered” on half my face.

“Haven’t heard from you,” Paul said. “You having a good day?”

I usually had a thousand things to tell him, but now all I could think about was dabbing enough spilled foundation to feather the other cheek. “Not really,” I said. Then I looked in the mirror and decided to wash it all off.

Jeff and I peered at diamonds, our hair touching, over the velvet. I stilled my head, and he hooked a plank of just-washed hair behind my ear and screwed in the glittering chip. The ones I tried on cost three thousand dollars.

“Do you have any less expensive?” he asked.

“Sure.” The jeweler shrugged, then smiled. “But these are very good quality. To keep the same you’re going to have to go smaller.”

The next pair didn’t sparkle as much.

And we went smaller still.

“I’ll take them,” he finally said. “You can’t really tell the difference.”

The jeweler’s eyebrows lifted involuntarily, then he controlled himself, set to cleaning the studs with a chamois cloth dabbed in alcohol, and installed them in a box fitted with slits. His gift in a light bag, Jeff walked me to my car.

“You watch Hitchcock?”

I nodded sure.

“I was thinking of
Rear Window
, how the waltz saves the wallflower’s life. He had really amazing scores. Boogies, street noise. So what’re you guys doing tonight?”

I shrugged. “Paul’s working.” I leaned against my Jeep, arms crossed, shuddering in the sun. “I’ll throw Willie the ball. We have mitts.”

“You love that boy, all right.”

“Even though I work and everything, it’s—” My hand landed on my chest.

“I get that. And I understand about your work too. But you know what, Claire?” He gripped my arm, below the shoulder; he liked me, this guy liked me. “You and Paul should have more sex.” The puff of his breath warmed my cheek. “It softens everything.”

I’d have more sex with you, I thought, lifting a hand to my face, which all of a sudden felt unstable. He wasn’t handsome exactly. He just missed. His front teeth overlapped. He hadn’t had braces. But his profile against the sky, in the parking lot, I thought I could love him.

“Try the sex. Really. It just loosens everything. We’ve found that.”

I guess they still had it. That went into me, a splinter.

He knocked the tiny bag against my hip. “Thanks for this.”

That afternoon, I ran a mile. Since New Year’s Eve, I’d started running; that was the real gift from Jeff, I thought. I could grade my run by my stomach. And I’d managed some improvement. For the second week, the diapers remained on the shelf.

I ran past the big houses, west of Seventh, where I’d heard that a movie composer, who had four kids and a jet, lived in the dark shingled Craftsman with a red door.

It turned out, though, that running wasn’t the only gift from Jeff. A week later, a package arrived. Bose noise-canceling headphones, with a computer-printed card.
To dull the leaf blower. x, j
.

My mother and Tom visited on a cold June afternoon, fog blowing in, lidding the sky. She stilted up the lawn on heels carrying a jar of applesauce. “Just heat it up a little, it’s those good yellow apples and cinnamon. Boy, it’s really what they call June gloom.”

She instructed Tom to carry in the goose, now a waist-high, honking, plangent animal, erratic in its movements.

“That goose is making her sick,” Tom muttered, hands in the pockets of his familiar pants. “She’s up in the night. A goose is a very dirty animal.”

It nipped me with its bill, which didn’t feel as rounded as it looked.

“There, there,” my mother said, petting the thing’s small head, an inverted note. “He’s still your goose,” she called out to Will, who was sulking in the yard as they loaded it back into its box in the car.

When they left, I dialed Paul.

“Yes,” he said, sotto voce. “What?” I’d already called twice that day. My quota. “My mom,” I said. “When I go to Lil’s, you can’t leave Will alone with her.”

“Claire, I’m
in the Room.”

“She can’t take care of him.” She was a terrible, distracted driver. She’d scan the ribbon of stores outside her window, then say “Ooop,” slamming on the brake.

“Fine,” he said and hung up.

His sister in Boston—who had a law degree but now worked part-time—took home movies of her baby during her maternity leave, so her husband could watch them at midnight.

I did try to be a wife. How many dinner parties did I cook that summer for the guys Paul worked with and their wives? Jeff and Helen came too. Lola made a diary of our menus, and she took pictures of the food. Paul kept the conversations going. I didn’t understand the references, the names of actors. I got up and down, taking in plates.

Late, the nights of the parties, Lola and I cleaned the kitchen, talking about which recipes succeeded, picking at leftovers. Finally, that August, she started eating with us, except on the rare nights when Paul came home.

The evening with Buck Price and Sky, my dessert, a latticed rhubarb tart, turned out exceptionally well. Buck said, “We’ll have to have you guys over too.”