Snowstorms in a Hot Climate (22 page)

“Well, Marla. I think I should congratulate you.”

Set poised to murder an oyster, I granted it a moment’s reprieve as I looked up to meet his gaze. “On what?”

“Where do I begin? On Elly’s spiritual recovery? On your keeping of my secret? Or, perhaps, on the guarding of your own?”

As I lifted the shell to my mouth, I could have sworn I saw the oyster shiver. “My own?” I swallowed.

“I don’t think I’d realized that you’d come to take her home.”

I swallowed again. “I hadn’t. It was her decision.”

“Of course. And yet even when she made up her mind to go
back with you, you were never tempted to tell her about my proposed trip?”

“You asked for my word, Lenny. And I gave it.”

“Indeed you did. As an officer and a gentleman. Alas, neither of the descriptions does you full justice, Marla. You know, it really is a shame our acquaintance has been so brief. I would very much like to have gotten to know you better.”

I didn’t waste time trying to look flattered. “I’m not sure you would. I’m actually quite a dull person.”

“That’s not what J.T. says.”

It was a remark designed to cause a reaction. I gave him the pleasure of one. Since he had to be lying, my consternation could give nothing away. “What does J.T. know? We hardly spoke more than a dozen words to each other.”

He shrugged. “Well, you must have picked the right dozen. You should be flattered. He really hates most people, you know. Sometimes I think he doesn’t even like me.”

“Really,” I said evenly. “But I thought you were good friends.”

“Well …” He made a dismissive gesture. “Perhaps I’m just paranoid. It’s only a feeling I get sometimes. That maybe we keep secrets from each other. But then I don’t find that strange. I think there’s probably quite a lot of ambiguity in friendship, wouldn’t you agree?”

Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly. Sod off, said the fly. “I wouldn’t know. I suppose it depends on the friendship in question.”

“Exactly,” he said emphatically, as if it had been just the answer he was looking for. “Here comes Elly. Right on cue. You can always spot her in a restaurant. The smallest lady with the fullest plate. I’m going to miss her, you know. Although I daresay you find that hard to believe. Nevertheless, it’s true.”

Suffice it to say I was not moved. As confessions go, it was a
little threadbare. He was not telling me how much he loved her. He was simply expressing regret at losing her. It was still about possession. Not the noblest of qualities.

She arrived back bearing a harvest in front of her and, mistaking the tension for the one she had left behind, took it upon herself to spread a little sunshine. The rest of the evening went passing fair. I think what I loved most about her that night was her innocence. She truly believed that she had fought her battle and won. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that Lenny had not conceded defeat. She had always been one for happy endings, and whatever wounds she had sustained over those last few years, it seemed that something of optimism and energy had remained. And so, when Lenny raised his glass across the table and announced with full pomp and circumstance—“To Paris”—she met his eyes and did not, I think, read the challenge in the toast. But then it was not meant for her.

I
f we had lain becalmed in California sunshine, now the wind was up. I woke early, disturbed by the hermetic silence of the sealed box, and decided on a preemptive strike with regard to the bill. It was ten to eight when I approached the desk. But I had been outmaneuvered. The room had been paid for in advance, my night bought for me. At the house phone Elly answered. Lenny was gone. A call had come just after dawn and he had slipped away, instructing her to apologize and to say he would see me in New York. What could be so urgent as to pull him out of bed at such an inhuman hour? Of course Elly didn’t know. Why should she? He hadn’t told her his business when
they were together, why should he start now that they were apart?

I rode the glass casket up to the eleventh floor. Her door was unlocked, and breakfast was laid out on the table. She was standing by the window, staring out into a bright blue San Francisco morning, a woman alone. Rejoicing or regretting? I didn’t ask. Over hot rolls and coffee we made plans. A few local calls turned them into plane reservations, and then Elly picked up the phone one more time and asked the operator for an out-of-town number.

“Santa Cruz 6791, please—J.T.,” she explained, her hand over the mouthpiece: “I just want to say good-bye.”

6791 … 6791. I retreated to the bathroom to give her privacy and to scribble down a number which, with any luck, I would never need to dial. Through the half-closed door I heard chippings of conversation. J.T. did not appear to say much. I imagined him double-thinking every word, picking his way through meaning in search of unexploded mines. His reticence seemed to embarrass her, making her clumsy where, I suspect, she had rehearsed elegance. But the facts got out somehow. She had called to say good-bye. She was leaving, going to Paris with me, then back to England for a while. She had wanted to thank him, for hospitality provided and advice given. She was sorry they hadn’t talked more. She hoped he understood. She also wanted to ask him a favor, however stupid it might sound. Would he look after Lenny for her?

In the bottom of my stomach something twisted, a small but sour pain. Conscience lives not in the head but in the bowels. I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror. My skin and hair had ripened in the sun, but the large strong nose and big mouth remained the same, and under them the chin still announced truculence to the world. Unlike Ophelia, I was neither honest nor fair. It was not, however, the time to mourn lost virtues.
Through the door I heard the ping of the receiver, and I strode back into the room. Elly looked a little crumpled sitting there but smiled as I came in.

“He sends you his regards. Said if you ever need any help with the sky at night to give him a call.” She frowned. “Whatever that means.”

“It means I told him once that I was interested in stargazing. Just a white lie in the cause of keeping the conversation going.” I lied a darker shade of pale. “I’m surprised he remembered.”

“Yeah, well, I always said you scored more of a hit than you realized.” She stood up, brushing the crumbs from her skirt. At the same instant there was a tap on the door. Time to go. She picked up her jacket and looked at me. “Well—ready for the mysterious East?”

We said our good-byes under the soft hum of airport strip lighting. It was only a temporary separation, and we treated it lightly. Of course, we could have done it differently. We could have traveled back together and I could have gone on to Boston the next day. But we had decided against it. Or rather she had. Now that the going had begun, she wanted it done cleanly. She had started alone; that was how she would finish. I admired her certainty, but even so, as my plane circled over the Cape for our final descent into Boston, I couldn’t help but wonder how it was for her, arriving back in New York for the very last time.

“Don’t fret, Marla,” she had said and smiled. “That apartment and I are used to our own company. We’ve shared a lot together. It’ll do us good to have a couple of days alone to say good-bye. Cleansing rituals, that’s all. But you’re not excluded. You can come back anytime.”

Nevertheless, I would give her the full five days. Boston would occupy me for that long, sightseeing and visiting. I had embellished the truth a little when I told Elly that there was a friend I had to see. Teresa Geldhorn was not exactly a friend,
and I did not have to see her. On the other hand, she was pretty high up on my list of acquaintances, and there were always things to talk about. She had been eleven years older than I when I arrived at Cambridge, but she was already the best medieval historian of her generation and one of the university’s toughest tutors. She was one of a new breed of women academics, feminist in word as well as action.

Before her had been generations of advance guard, women who protected themselves against discrimination by denying their femininity: J. D. Pendleton, D. S. Johnson, the list continues; pince-nez women, with flat shoes and brains filed like teeth, digging into the silt of lost history; omnivorous, with insatiable appetite for detail. She was different. The brain was just as sharp, but she refused to bury herself in excavation. She challenged the status quo and made it clear that hers were victories for gender as well as individual ego. The men, of course, were wonderfully threatened but could do nothing to undermine her.

Against the odds, she and I had got on. Maybe it was her need to be challenged, or maybe she had sensed in my isolation and belligerence a shadow of her younger self. Whatever the reason, she had taken me up as her good academic cause and, with a thoroughly unsentimental dedication, had set about fashioning my academic future, guiding and bullying me through tripos exams to research, and from research to teaching. Our relationship had never been anything but formal and academic. I knew nothing of her private life, and she knew nothing of mine. But still over the years we had kept in touch. A kind of politeness almost. And so, when she decided to take up the Harvard offer of a three-year teaching post, six months after I had been appointed to UC, I had been one of the people she had written to, extending a firm invitation to tea if ever I should be passing through. And, since I was, I called her and we agreed to meet.

Looking back now, I see that those Boston days were like the last days of summer, a time when everything is ripe and still, and yet you know it cannot last. I suppose I should have realized then that what was resolved could also be unresolved, but I was too busy enjoying the triumph of Elly’s return. Boston joined in the celebrations. The city was at its best—hot, green, and glorious—with its wide tree-lined avenues and its brown sluggish river shining under a hazy sun. It reminded me of London, rather formal and not without pride. Not unlike Teresa herself. America, it seemed, had done nothing to pollute her Englishness. She lived, fittingly, in Cambridge, in a small but elegant brownstone house within walking distance of my hotel.

When I arrived there that first afternoon, punctual to the minute, I discovered it to be full of cats and bookshelves. She sat me down in an armchair in the study next to a window full of birdsong, poured me a dry sherry from a cut-glass decanter, and asked me questions in her cool precise way, for all the world as if this were her room in Girton and we were meeting again after the long vacation. And watching her sitting there in her blue skirt and blouse, a single gold chain around her neck, and her hair cut short with flecks of gray, I wondered whether I wasn’t looking at an image of myself ten years on, discussing academic futures with favorite pupils. Certainly I could do worse than this Olivia de Havilland self-containment; quiet pleasure amid the smell of paper and ink.

And then I wondered, not for the first time, if she ever lay in bed at night crippled by a sense of futility, or haunted by the specters of sexual frustration. I wondered about this while all the time we talked of other things—the comparative curiosity of American and English students, her latest published articles, my half-formed, unpublished ones. And if she was a little disappointed in the speed of my academic progress, she did not show it. Instead we mused over the problems of reconciling teaching
with research, and she suggested a few people I might contact, publishers who might be interested in my work on the Lindisfarne monastery. And for a while she really did go some way to convincing me that this was it—the sunshine, the sherry, the study of the past, and her firm, poised grip on the world. But when at last I left her on that fourth and final evening, after a quiet simple supper, and we stood on her polished step, shaking slightly awkward hands under the glow of the streetlamp, I knew that the illusion went with her; that for me it could never be quite as whole or as satisfying. And I think she knew it too. And I wondered how much it mattered, or if perhaps she had a store of heirs apparent to carry on her good work.

Back in my elegant, expensive hotel, I fell asleep almost immediately. In fact, those nights in Boston I slept remarkably well, better than I had done for months. So, when Elly’s phone call woke me the next morning, the sun was already high in the sky and I was prepared for anything.

“… well, I was planning on taking the train. Probably late afternoon. It would get me in around nine
P.M
. tonight. Why?”

“Could you make it a little earlier?”

“Yes, of course. Why?”

“Oh, nothing really. There’s been a slight change in schedule. I wanted to tell you about it.”

“What is it?” I sounded wonderfully unperturbed.

“I’ll explain when I see you. It’s not important. Do you want me to meet you at the station?”

“No,” I heard myself say. “No. I’ll find my own way. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

And I was. Amtrak did not waste time, and I hit Grand Central Terminal when most people were leaving it. It was a good introduction back into New York; bedlam, with a thousand commuters pouring in through the barriers and flooding onto the trains. Another day of upward mobility. I was moving
against the flow, but the pace was infectious. Outside I hailed a cab with what looked like a knife wound in the backseat. I sat and watched the meter move. There was no point in worrying about something before I knew what it was. I imagined Teresa Geldhorn pouring boiling water over Earl Grey tea leaves and getting stuck back into Capetian foreign policy. There is much to be said for dead men, even if history discovers that not all of them told the truth.

Outside the apartment block, I held my finger on the bell. The intercom buzzed her voice down. It had broken glass in it. The door opened. I nodded to the porter. The lift was waiting. On the eighth floor so was she, a tight little smile on her face. I walked past her into a maelstrom, a chaos of furniture and wooden crates and, in the corner, two smart leather suitcases, all packed and ready to go. I turned.

“Lenny’s father has had a heart attack,” she announced quickly. “We heard last night. He took the last plane to Rhode Island. It sounds bad.”