Off Course (34 page)

Cress could never remember which time was the last time, because neither knew it would be the last. She saw him when the Mulholland job was almost done, and then he must have been done, because she passed him in his truck midweek on Noah Mountain Road. He waved.

His truck was never parked at the bars, at least not when she drove by. She saw him infrequently on the road (he always waved). More often, she passed Sylvia (no wave). So they were still around. Seeing either one set off her heart and made her hands shake.

She was spending more time down south, a week or two every month. She had a desk in the
City and State
offices now, and a title: contributing editor. Tillie and Edgar had bought a large house by the Arroyo in Pasadena, and she had her own room—and bath!—on the second floor there.

Her father retired; her parents sold both Meadows cabins in the upward-trending housing market. Cress thought, for a split second, she might want the A-frame; then she remembered the Garshes. Her parents wanted to travel now, and her father, working with a Realtor, invested in second mortgages.

Her sister, Sharon, was coming to town as a visiting lecturer at her alma mater, the USC School of Music.

Cress quit working at Beech Creek, although Dalia called her in for the large banquets, and Cress was happy to help.

Donna, with a swift backward glance in the Sawyer bakery, spoke softly over the top of two-year-old Ava's blond curls. “I still don't understand why Sylvia took him back. I mean, a one- or two-night stand is one thing; even a two- or three-month affair might be forgiven, but three-plus years, with all that lying? That amounts to a whole secret life!”

But Cress understood why Sylvia took him back. Given half a chance, she would, too.

*   *   *

She would always wish that some small scrap of self had reared up and saved her. But that is not what happened.

August 18, 1985

Dear Cress,

Greetings from USC! I am here in my new office, a long, skinny room with a view of an ivy-covered brick wall. I spent the morning at the Natural History Museum where I attached myself to a back room tour and saw many interesting things in glass jars: 2-foot-long centipedes, Siamese-twin pig fetuses, etc.). I am finally getting over my jet lag! Still, it is weird to be back in smog-socked ole So Cal.

I promise to visit as soon as I'm settled. I've already made great strides—I found a therapist and a good OA meeting that's not too full of anorexic actresses. AND I found a place to live, which is the main reason why I'm writing.

I told Mom and Dad that I'd consider staying permanently in the area if they'd give me the down payment for a house. They said … NO! (Big surprise!!!) (Dad did offer me a mortgage at 12%, which I can get from any bank. It's the 10% down I need help with.) All of which is to say, yesterday I signed a year lease on a funky little hillside house in Echo Park—on a clear day you can see the Hollywood sign
and
the ocean. The house has three bedrooms and two baths, a big deck, pretty yards, front and back, etc., but the rent is a little steep for one person (or I'm a little too cheap to pay it all). I'll have to get a roommate, and it occurred to me that maybe YOU would be that roommate.
DON'T
Just Say No! (I'm writing rather than calling so you'll have the leisure to overcome any knee-jerk resistance and think it over.) I figure we can get along, since I'll hardly ever be home and it's only for a year (the end is already in sight!), after which you can get another roommate or go back to the mountains, or pay the whole nut yourself, or burn the place down. I'll give you a great deal on your share of rent (to make up for past transgressions—I owe you!!! I also promise not to proselytize
too
much or be
too
much the big sister!).

I won't advertise for a roommate until you get back to me—but try to let me know in a week. We can move in on the first—I'm paid up here at the oatmeal-gray Oakwood till then.

Think about it. Then … Just Say YES!!!!

Love,

Sharon

Her father rented a U-Haul to move her. She was grateful for his offer to help—her mother was behind it, she was certain—but once he arrived, she regretted taking him up on it. Having her father, of all people, escort her south felt far too much like being led away in defeat, as if she was retreating to the bosom of her own family, the last place she wanted to be.

He hitched the Saab to a tow bar. “No sense wasting gas,” he said. “Though the added drag will definitely use more gas than the truck alone, especially on inclines. But your load is light.”

He insisted on stopping in Sparkville for coffee; she steered him to the Koffee Kup on the mad chance she might see Quinn one last time. If he was there, she thought, even if he was sitting with other men, or with Sylvia, she would go right up to him. She would tell him she was leaving, and she would watch the truth of it take hold in his pale green eyes.

Quinn was not at the Koffee Kup. She sipped ice water while Sam Hartley drank three cups of coffee. “Yes, please! Top her off! We have a long drive ahead of us! Whoa there! That's plenty, thanks! Got to save room for a little arf-'n'-arf!”

His term for half-and-half.

South of town, her father pulled off the road to buy honeydew melons at a rickety farmstand and again, near Bakersfield, he stopped for a crate of tomatoes. Cress waited in the hot cab while Sam engaged the vendor and other customers in a conversation about canning methods. This was beginning to seem like one of her dreams, when she was trying to get somewhere and one obstacle after another arose. Didn't he see that she was crawling out of her skin?

“That guy was selling figs for four dollars a basket.” Her father climbed back in the truck. “Eight, ten figs in each. My tree has a thousand figs on it easily. A hundred baskets, let's say, leaving plenty for the birds. That's what? Four hundred dollars? And I've been giving them away!”

Behind them, the Sierras sank into the valley mist, the highway thrummed under the truck's tires. The U-Haul locked in at fifty-five miles an hour, and cars passed them incessantly.

She would be a glint of light, a shred of old cloth, a mote by the time they got to Los Angeles, and here her father was signaling again, prompted by a another farmstand at the foot of the next off-ramp. “Can we sit this one out, Dad?” Cress said. “And keep driving? I'm so anxious about this move. You're sweet to help me, and I appreciate it so much. But can we just get there?”

“Hunh,” he said, braking as he veered onto the ramp. “Moving's never bothered me one way or the other, though it always put your mother in a tizzy. I'll be quick. I just want a sack of sweet onions. They're picked every morning, dirt still on 'em. Only two-fifty for twenty-five pounds.”

 

Twenty-Five

Exercise could raise Cress's spirits, Sharon said. As would getting out more, or taking a class. She should ride a bicycle or bake bread. Therapy—regular, not even the rebirthing variety—could recharge her. She might also consider AA, or just stop drinking so much. Sharon frowned at Cress's second glass of burgundy. “I can't see how guzzling a depressant helps anything.”

Amid this welter of advice—really, in self-defense—Cress took out her dissertation. How could Sharon nag or interrupt her when she was finally doing the necessary thing? She set up on the enclosed back porch, facing northwest toward the Hollywood sign. A few feet behind her, Sharon wrote lectures and graded papers at the dining room table. Once Cress got down to work, the diss proved no more onerous than several columns. She finished in six months.

With graphs, footnotes, and bibliography, the manuscript came to two hundred and ten pages and bore only a faint relation to her prospectus, which now seemed a naïve mix of exuberance and grandiosity. Cress had stopped caring if her premise was sound—far,
far
too late to worry about that!—and proceeded as if it were unimpeachable. She worried most about her margins, as a proctor would measure them for precision. (John Bird's margins had been off by a sixteenth of an inch, and his whole manuscript had to be retyped.)

Long distracted by other promising pupils, not to mention his own research, her advisor replied to her manuscript with an offhand note:
Looks good. Go ahead and set up your committee
. He appended a list of possible names.

She flew back a month later for the defense. Her committee consisted of three people from the Art Department and three from Econ. They spent a few minutes on each chapter, asking her to describe her major points. Every professor praised the soundness of the writing. For her journalism, she had developed a clear, amusing voice, and clear, amusing writing was so rare in econ dissertations, it passed for competence, even authority.

No one remarked on the thinness of her subject—essentially, she'd charted and theorized about the small leaps and setbacks in the careers of twenty artists. The painting professor (and only woman) said, “If I read this before starting out, I never would've become a painter.” A sculpture professor Cress didn't know proved annoying: Did she think selling prices were the only measurement of value in art? Did art have no value if it never entered the marketplace?

Of course it did. But this was about art
in
the marketplace.

She was sent down the hall to a small lounge where she sat looking out at the lead-gray river flowing through the state university. The cloud cover was low and taut. The last patches of dirty snow melted into the dead grass. Crows gathered in the naked branches of trees and made a terrible racket. She tried not to take this as a bad omen. Her dissertation, however tenuous its findings, had taken months—years, counting all that procrastination and avoidance—and in the end contained real work, even if the final product was made of spiderwebs.

“Congratulations,” her advisor whispered at the door, and brought her back into the seminar room.

Very good, the men and one woman murmured; a bit iconoclastic, but quite creative, and a pleasure to read. A few minor changes were needed—just enough so that, yes, the whole thing had to be repaginated and reprinted.

At least those years of resistance and delay had brought her into the era of personal computers and printers, so no massive retyping job was required.

She finished the revision in two weeks, and three weeks after that—six years and two months since she and John Bird parted in front of their Church Street apartment—she received a thin letter addressed to Dr. Cressida Hartley, Ph.D. Her parents drove down and took her and Sharon out to El Tepeyac to celebrate. “Now that you have this expensive degree,” her father said, “what are you going to do with it?”

*   *   *

Returning from a walk in Elysian Park one afternoon, Cress found Sharon in the driveway, the Saab's trunk open, and the bundled bearskin sitting on the concrete. “I hesitate to ask,” said Sharon, who had needed a tire jack.

The brown paper was torn, revealing green felt.

“I was too afraid to look,” said Cress.

Sharon went to the kitchen for a butcher knife and a broom. The twine cut with a
pop!
and the bundle relaxed. They pulled away the paper. The stiff green felt had molded into a clump. Using the end of a broom handle, Sharon prodded it open, prying the folds apart, poking them flat, felt side up. She looked like a warrior with a spear, or a gondolier. Centered on the green felt was a dry lake of mold the color of cigarette ash. Sharon flung aside the broom and, grabbing one front paw, pointed to the other. “Turn him over.”

The claws were still black and plastic-like. As they flipped the rug right side up, fur fell out in a rain of bristles, and a brown cloud arose. The sisters jumped back.

The nose had partly broken off from the skull, revealing papier-mâché; pink paint peeled off the tongue and two teeth dropped out on the pavement. On closer inspection, the fur seethed with tiny, winged, brown insects. “How long's it been in there, anyway?” said Sharon.

“Three, four years.”

“Well, it's garbage now!” Sharon yelped.

Sharon sprayed the skin with Raid. Later, they stuffed it into a trash barrel, leaving a bear-shaped shadow of bristles and dead bugs on the driveway. Sharon took her broom, swept briskly, and in moments even the shadow was in the bin.

*   *   *

“I still wish there was a twelve-step program for you,” Sharon said days before she flew back to London. “One of the biggest turning points in my life was when I made amends to everyone I'd hurt—except, of course, those people I'd only hurt again by contacting them.”

“Like Sylvia Morrow,” said Cress. “I could never make amends to her.”

“Oh, sure you can. That's an easy one. You stay the hell away from
him
!”

So Cress did. She stayed the hell away from Quinn. She never called (even just to hear his voice and hang up); she never mailed a letter to him (she wrote several); she never sent him a message through friends, or contacted them for news of him. In time, she lost track of most of those friends—Donna, Dalia, even Brian and Franny—who could pass on such a message. The only person she stayed in touch with (they swapped cards at the holidays) was Don Dare, and he'd moved a hundred miles from Sawyer to Fresno.

Cress kept her phone number listed, in case Quinn needed to find her.

*   *   *

Once Sharon was no longer there to nag her, Cress began running in the hills; she cut way back on the wine, took a drawing class, and found a therapist.

At first she talked about Quinn. She described their time together with pleasure, even reverence—but she harbored no hope. She'd given up. Sylvia was triumphant. But Cress could not shake the feeling that part of her had been left behind, as if her soul were invisibly married to Quinn in some kind of alternate existence. When her therapist asked her to describe this other life, Cress saw log walls, a jagged peak through the window. A low voice coursed in the background. She imagined berry picking, padding through the tall woods, fishing—well, Quinn fishing and her nearby, reading.