Tell Me One Thing (16 page)

She waits for the outburst to dissipate into the ocean breeze, until there’s a pool of quiet. What kind of love is he talking about? To Lucia it feels like love as steamroller, a sort of love that destroys everything in its path. She says quietly but firmly, without looking at him, “That doesn’t make everything all better.”

“What do you want me to do? Anything. Just tell me.”

“I want you to listen to me.” She says it as clearly, as firmly, as she can.

“I am. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do anything you say. All I want is for you to come back. Lucy, anything. Tell me.”

They walk in silence, Lucia trying to figure out how they got from her declaration of unhappiness to his demand that she come up with tasks for him. Richard is watching her, holding on desperately to the slimmest hope that maybe, if he’s good enough and careful enough, she will come back.

“It feels like,” she begins tentatively, “that your need to love me has nothing to do with me.”

“That makes no sense.”

Again he doesn’t understand or won’t stop a minute to understand or refuses to try or …? Lucia doesn’t know anymore. All right, she tries something more concrete. “I don’t think we’re well matched.”

“How can you say that?!” It’s almost a scream.

Lucia ignores the tone and continues. “You’re certain about everything. It used to be fine for you to be certain for both of us, but it isn’t now.”

“What the hell are you saying?”

Lucia winces and then pushes herself to try again. “I don’t know anymore what I like or what I want or how I want to be in the world. All I know how to do is to agree with you.”

Richard stops walking and so she does, too. “Just come home.”

She looks at him in complete incredulity. “Do you hear one word I said? I’m trying to explain—”

But he cuts her off. He doesn’t want any more explanations. “We’ll work out everything we need to when we’re home. I promise you.”

She stares at him. She’s a statue, turned to stone, a statue staring, then suddenly she turns and starts walking away from him.

“Lucy!” he screams.

And she whirls around and screams back at him, “I hate that! My name is Lucia, Lucia! Lucy is someone you made up!”

LUCIA DRIVES AROUND IN CIRCLES
. She travels east on Wilshire and makes an angry left turn, north, on Fourteenth Street instead of south into Ocean Park. She checks her rearview mirror every ten seconds—
Is that Richard’s car?
She makes a precipitous right turn onto Montana, checks again, drives all the way to Bundy. Another look. She knows he’s capable of following her, and the possibility keeps her anger lit—how intrusive he is! It’s more than an hour before she feels safe enough to drive to Max’s. Finally, the need to be “home,” the need to talk to Bernadette, propels her to Sycamore Street and the long driveway, where she leaves the car, almost tripping in her haste to get into the kitchen.
Let Bernadette be there alone
.

And her prayers are answered. Bernadette is sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea, quietly reading the morning paper as Lucia rushes in.

“I feel like I’ve been mugged.”

Bernadette sighs as she puts the newspaper aside—does she really want to hear about this? But she has no choice. And then she sees that Lucia’s hands are shaking as she pulls out a chair and sits down across from her, and immediately Bernadette regrets her own lack of empathy.

“It’s all about what he’s feeling, Detta—‘I love you, therefore everything’s all right!’ But it isn’t. And he won’t hear me. I tried, really Detta, I did.”

Bernadette nods. She believes her. “Did he cry?”

“No. At least not that.”

“He cried with me.”

“Oh no, Detta. I’m so sorry, but then you saw—he revels in this excess. He keeps saying he loves me, but it’s all about his
need
to love me. Him. Him. All about him!”

Bernadette shakes her head, a finger to her lips, her eyes over Lucia’s head to the doorway where Max and Maggie stand, hand in hand. But Maggie has heard, at least some of it—her mother’s angry tone, saying bad things about her daddy. And she doesn’t want to hear any more of it. She launches herself across the kitchen into her mother’s legs, pushing her head into Lucia’s lap. If she were speaking she would be screaming, “Don’t say that! Don’t talk about my daddy that way!” but her actions speak loudly enough because Lucia gathers Maggie into her lap and the angry buzzing in the air settles at once. Better, now it’s better, Maggie sees, and she didn’t have to say anything. Words don’t matter all that much because look—her mother is holding her and has quieted down and she’s not talking about her daddy in that way now.

Lucia stands with Maggie clinging to her. She looks at Max
and Bernadette over Maggie’s head, a condemnation of Richard in her eyes—
Do you see what he’s wrought?
And with Maggie’s legs circling her waist and the child’s arms around her mother’s neck now, Lucia walks out into the backyard and then up the steps to their apartment, murmuring words only the two of them can hear, soothing sounds that quiet them both.

RICHARD DOESN’T GO BACK TO RIVERSIDE
. He can’t manage to get into his car and drive east for an hour to the empty apartment that is waiting for him, so he stays at the Surfsider on the outskirts of Venice and calls Lucia nonstop. He leaves tangled, rambling messages that he fears don’t help his cause, but he can’t seem to stop himself.

At night, he walks. Long midnight hikes that take him from Venice Beach north to Santa Monica, then farther north to Pacific Palisades and then up the coast through Malibu, until his legs give out.

During the day he haunts the Santa Monica City College campus, hoping against all expectations that he’ll see Bernadette again. And then, one day he does. She’s walking hand in hand with a large man with a lot of bushy, blond hair who he figures must be Max. They’re talking to each other in the way that people do when their relationship is new and they have lots to say, so Richard has to call out to her—“Bernadette!”—which stops them both. Bernadette finds him standing outside Drescher Hall, and something close to panic races across her face. Max sees it and tells her to stay put. Then he walks toward Richard.

“Max Weber,” he says with his hand extended for a shake.

Richard ignores the gesture. Looking over Max’s shoulder, he says, “I need to talk to Bernadette.”

“No, you don’t.”

Max’s words don’t even register with Richard. He attempts to push past the larger man, to get to Bernadette, who takes two steps back instinctively. Max wraps his hand around Richard’s upper arm and starts walking him away. “She’s told you everything she’s going to say.”

Bernadette, watching, is so grateful to Max that she thinks seriously, for the first time, of marrying him.

“You need to go home,” Max is telling Richard in a low voice.

“This is none of your goddamn business.”

“Yes, it is, because you’re upsetting Bernadette. When you love someone,” Max says pointedly, “you don’t want them upset.”

“Don’t you lecture me on—”

“Lucia and Maggie are upset, Maggie especially. It’s Maggie I’m worried about.”

Richard wrenches his arm free and stops walking. “What are you talking about?”

“She’s stopped speaking. She won’t utter a single word.”

“To you, maybe.”

“To anyone. Her mother included. Lucia didn’t tell you?”

“No.” Richard seems genuinely stunned. “For how long?”

“Weeks now.”

“But she chatters away nonstop.”

“Not now.” Then, because Richard looks so puzzled: “It may be her way of dealing with all this stress.”

“Stress that her mother created!”

“That you’re making worse.”

Richard shakes his head. “Don’t put this on me. I’m not the one who left. I’m not the one who’s ripping this family apart—”

“Richard!” Max overrides him, his voice harsh—
Pay attention to what I’m saying
. “You can’t think all this stalking and drama is helping. You know it isn’t.”

Max puts a hand on the younger man’s shoulder in sympathy.
What does Richard want but his wife, whom he loves, to come back to him?

“Go home,” Max tells him. “Let them be for now. Let Lucia take care of your daughter. Be a mensch.”

Richard lowers his eyes and stares at the sidewalk beneath his feet. “And then what?”

“I don’t know. You’ll wait and see.”

If Max weren’t so nice, Richard could get angry, but he can’t. Instead he has to do the hardest thing for him—nothing. Instead he has to feel the pain that has turned his heart into a tiny, tight kernel of perpetual ache.

Now he knows he has to go home. Max is going to be the gatekeeper, he’s made that clear, keeping him at bay. Richard leaves an explicit message on Lucia’s voice mail saying he’s leaving and making sure she understands that it doesn’t mean he’s given up or that her insanity makes sense to him.

Back in his lab at the university, Richard continues his research but finds himself, without warning, several times a week, hunched over his microscope, weeping. One of his lab assistants, Mei-ling, places a hand on his back in comfort and then goes back to her workstation when Richard’s sobs subside. They don’t speak about it.

IT IS BERNADETTE’S HOPE, WITH RICHARD GONE
back to Riverside, that Lucia can now take the next necessary steps—finding an apartment of her own, a job. They had all agreed in the weeks before Lucia and Maggie showed up, during the many phone calls leading to their flight, that Max’s garage apartment would be a temporary refuge, “a way station,” as Bernadette referred to it when speaking with both Max and Lucia. But Lucia has seemed to have forgotten that agreement, or worse yet, and this is Bernadette’s
fear—Lucia is stuck. It seems to Bernadette that all forward motion has stopped.

Max hasn’t complained—he’s generous and understanding that way—but Bernadette feels responsible for the disruption in what was an almost idyllic solitude that they both cherished.

BERNADETTE REALIZES SHE HAS TO
do something. What she’d like to do is jolt Lucia into action, but she knows that probably isn’t the best way of approaching the situation.
Change is hard
, she keeps reminding herself in order to bolster her compassion level. What she needs to do is guide Lucia to the first step. It’s always the hardest, that first step.

With “guiding” in mind, with “easing” as her goal, Bernadette takes Lucia with her to the Santa Monica Farmers Market, the one she always goes to on Saturday mornings at Pico and Cloverfield, exactly across from the off-ramp Lucia and Maggie took when they got off the Santa Monica Freeway weeks ago.
Fitting, isn’t it? Symbolic
, Bernadette thinks.

It’s not the biggest of the farmers markets, but it’s in their neighborhood and Bernadette knows most of the vendors now by name. Of course, she stops and chats every few feet as they make their way through, Lucia following along in Bernadette’s wake, feeling like an afterthought.

And then there is the produce. Bernadette seems mesmerized by the varieties of heirloom tomatoes—yellow, pink, striped, blushing red. Huge tomatoes that must weigh more than a pound, tiny tomatoes that look like clusters of grapes. And the squash—zucchini in shades of green and black, crookneck squash in sun-bright yellow, pale green trombone squash that curves around itself almost three feet long. And eggplants in all colors—pink, lavender, white, deep purple that glows black. Bernadette is in
her element. All the colors, the aromas! She picks up a bouquet of Thai basil and inhales its smell before putting it back. No one seems to mind.

As they walk, Bernadette chatters on about the “edible art,” as she calls all the gorgeous vegetables, and tries to figure out how to bring up the issue of Lucia’s unemployment. She can hardly say, “When are you going to do something about getting a job? How can you rent an apartment without any money?”

Instead she begins talking about Max’s oldest son, Danny, who teaches first grade at a charter school in East Oakland. How much he’s taken to teaching, how grateful Max is that his son has found what he loves to do.

“But the summers are hard,” Bernadette tells Lucia as they approach a vendor selling a kaleidoscope of sweet peppers. “They pay beginning teachers so little that he has to find a summer job. Each summer. There’s something wrong with that, don’t you think?”

Lucia agrees, but Bernadette can tell she’s not really listening. They’ve got to sit down and face each other so she can have all of Lucia’s attention. She steers her to a little outdoor café—really just a coffee cart and a few tables set up under a tree—and brings two lattes back to the table.

“Richard must be calling you,” Lucia says before Bernadette can even put their coffees down. “He’s harassing you, isn’t he?”

“Don’t worry about that.” Bernadette doesn’t want to have yet another conversation about Richard.

“Because we both know he can be ruthless.”

Bernadette needs to focus Lucia’s attention on her own situation. “He’s just venting—”

“He’s taking advantage of you. That’s what he does! He uses people—”

“Lucia, we don’t need to talk about Richard. It’s fine.… I
wanted to tell you about Danny and this really interesting summer job he got.”

“Danny?” Lucia is having trouble shifting gears.

“Max’s oldest, who we were talking about.”

“Oh, yes. The teacher.”

“Right. And he got this research job with an educational think tank, something about different learning styles for different kids. Anyway, it dovetails beautifully with his real job and pays enough for him to get through the summer and he got it on Craigslist. Amazing, huh?”

“I’ve thought about Craigslist.…” Lucia says, a half sentence.

“Oh, it’s a great resource.” Bernadette tries to keep the relief out of her voice. “I think Danny met his partner on Craigslist, too, but he hasn’t ever really said that. Max and I guessed it, but maybe we’re wrong. And then Max found a lot of his beekeeping equipment there. You can find anything on Craigslist!” She puts a hand on Lucia’s hand, to reinforce what she’s about to say. “You know, Lucia, feel free to come in and use my computer whenever you want. There are just tons of jobs listed.”