The Last Beach Bungalow (13 page)

M
ONDAY

I had a ten-minute slot in which to interview Chuck Williams for my eight-hundred-word piece, after which his handlers would cut me off, but he spoke to me as if he had all day and would rather be doing nothing besides chatting with a stranger about common kitchen gadgets. “I buy what I like, and I like things that are well-designed,” he said. “Things that are well made, that perform a function.”

“What are some of your favorites?”

“I still like the porcelain creamer shaped like a cow,” he said. “That was one of the first things I stocked in the original store and we’re still selling them today.”

“What about your kitchen at home? What do you most often use?”

“My favorite piece of kitchen equipment is a small sauté pan with a lid,” he said. “I cook at home for myself and that pan is ideal for making a sauce or a stew.”

I wanted to weep at the thought of this old man cooking dinner for himself in his apartment. He was head of a three-billion-dollar company and he had to make himself stew at night?

“A sauté pan?” I asked. I was just trying to buy a moment to recover.

“I appreciate things that will last a lifetime,” he said. “I like things that I know will look good a hundred years from now.”

I wanted to ask Chuck Williams how he could face the sauté pan every night knowing that it would probably outlive him. That pan would be used in someone else’s kitchen, passed down and passed around for years after he was gone. How could he bear it?

Instead, I thanked him for his time. He had given me more usable quotes in less time than anyone I’d ever interviewed.

After my first breast surgery, Vanessa tried to cheer me up by taking me to get my nails done. It was supposed to be a soothing afternoon activity, but I cringed throughout the entire manicure. The manicurist, with her sharp tools, felt exactly like a surgeon or a radiologist or the nurse who hooked up the chemo lines. I had to fight the whole time not to yank my hands out of hers. An energy healer was a somewhat easier indulgence because when you’re naked, leaping off the table is not an option.

A woman with unexpectedly bad skin led me into a small room down a well-lit hallway. She lit a candle and asked me to change into the striped cotton gown that was folded neatly on the massage table. “Bra off, panties on,” she said—and I smiled to think of all the strange places I’d heard those words.

I lay down on the table. It was covered in white cotton terry cloth that had been heated from within. Someone knocked, and the woman with bad skin came in. She took a fleece blanket, also heated, and lay it over me with the care of a mother tucking her newborn in to sleep. “Comfortable?” she asked.

“Yes, thank you,” I said.

“Dr. Kim will be with you in a moment,” she said. “Enjoy the music.”

I closed my eyes. The sound, which filled the room from speakers wired into the ceiling, came from a flute. It sounded like a Gregorian chant played by a wood-wind. It was beautiful and eerie. I tried to pick out a pattern, but couldn’t discern one. Soon there was another knock on the door and Dr. Kim walked in.

“You like the music?” he asked. “It’s my favorite. Native American flute.”

“Yes,” I said. “I like it.”

“Good!” His voice was like a gong, deep and resonant. He had shoulder-length hair that had been pulled back into a ponytail. His eyes were very narrow and black and I could feel him assessing me already, peering at me. He was a polished, handsome man—the kind that you might see on the cover of
GQ
. The comfort I had felt a few moments before as I lay near-naked under the heated blanket had vanished. He glanced at the papers I had filled out in the front room.

“You have one girl?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“How old?”

“Fifteen.”

“Ah!” he said, as if this were significant.

“And how long have you been married?”

“Sixteen years.”

“And you are building a house, you say?”

“Yes.”

“Big house?”

I laughed. “Huge,” I said.

“You say here that you are agitated? This is why you are here?”

I felt tears well up in my eyes.

Dr. Kim put his hand on the top of my head. “Let me look at your tongue.”

I opened my mouth.

“Stick out your tongue,” he said. “Ahhhhh.”

I stuck it out and he scribbled something on the papers. He took my pulse on my left wrist, then my right and wrinkled his brow as if detecting something serious.

“OK!” he said, suddenly. “We’ll start with your feet.”

I nodded, as if I knew what would happen next. He peeled the blanket back to my knees and lifted my left foot. He pinched the tendons above the heel, which hurt. “Breathe,” he commanded, and demonstrated by taking a deep drink of air. “Breathe until there is no pain.”

I did as I was told.

After taking several breaths, the pain of his pinching was gone. He moved his fingers to one of my toes and gave me the same command. For an hour, all I did was lie in various positions and breathe into the places where, as if by magic, Dr. Kim knew I was hurting. The next thing I knew, he was telling me that it was time for me to dress. He walked out briskly and shut the door.

A few minutes later, he knocked and came back into the little room.

“You must forgive him,” he said, abruptly.

“Excuse me?”

“You must forgive him,” he repeated.

I just stared, incredulous. “My husband?”

He nodded.

“For what?”

“The color inside your head is very red. The color of rage. It’s too hot. He loves you?”

“My husband?” I asked again, and then because I knew that he was the person in question and I knew without a doubt what the answer was, I said, “Yes.”

“Maybe you must forgive him for loving you. Twenty minutes, morning and night,” he said, exactly as if he were giving me instructions for gargling with salt water or soaking my feet. He put his hand on the doorknob. “And when you are done with this twenty minutes,” he added, “then you forgive yourself.”

I managed to speak in time to stop him from disappearing. “For what?” I asked.

“Not allowing it.”

I got in the car and drove the four blocks to Pepper Tree Lane. As I drove by, I saw Peg Torrey standing in her front yard. There were two dogs lying at her feet—big black Labradors. Peg was picking lemons from a tree that looked like it could be in a painting. There were dozens of huge, very yellow lemons hanging amid glossy green leaves. She was placing them one by one in a basket. I parked at the end of the street and walked back, as if I were a regular walking the neighborhood or someone who was coming back from a stroll on the beach. I stopped at the end of her walkway, bracing myself for the dogs to leap up. They lifted their heads, hauled themselves up and padded softly over to sniff my shoes. The dogs were old.

“It’s a great day for lemonade,” I said.

Peg smiled. “I was thinking of lemon meringue pie.” I noticed that she was not wearing the necklace I’d left on the doorknob yesterday. The only jewelry she had on was her wedding ring.

“With a tree like that, you could have lemons for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

She laughed. “This tree has been producing fruit like this for thirty years, every season of the year. My daughter used to say it was magic.”

“What’s your secret?” I asked. One of the dogs continued to sniff at one of my feet. The other dog lay down next to my other foot, pinning me to where I stood.

Peg dropped a lemon in her basket. “We planted it over the ashes of a very special dog,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Peg laughed again, a full throated guffaw. “No need to apologize,” she said, “it was a long time ago. Her name was Little Ann.”

I may not be a dog lover, but I was one of those kids who stayed up late reading books under the covers when I was supposed to be asleep. I burned out a lot of flashlights in my day. “Like Little Ann from
Where the Red Fern Grows
?” I asked.

Peg held the lemon in her hand and turned her body toward me. “Yes,” she said, and then she seemed to notice that her dogs were in my personal space. “Pete,” she called. “Pretzel.” She whistled softly and the dogs returned to their spot on the grass in the shade of the lemon tree.

“She wasn’t a coon dog, was she?”

“Cocker spaniel,” Peg said.

“My daughter wants a dog for Christmas,” I said, “and she’s always wanted one of those.” I was very careful with my words. I felt like it was important not to lie. “Would you recommend one?”

“We’ve always had retrievers since Little Ann,” Peg said, “and I actually never knew her. She was my husband’s dog before I met him.”

I nodded, as if this explained the magic of the tree. I was about to continue walking. I felt as if I had stayed long enough and felt satisfied by having heard this story about the dog and the tree and thirty years of lemons. When I glanced up to wave good-bye, however, I noticed that there were tears running down Peg’s cheeks. She was just standing there in her front yard, crying. She saw me see her, and she smiled.

“It’s such an old story,” she said, and waved her hand as if to dismiss it.

I stood stock-still and prayed for her to keep talking.

“I killed Little Ann,” she said. “It’s how I met Harry. I hit her with my car.”

I pictured a rainy night. A young woman driving a car with a stick shift. A sickening thud. A man crouched at the dog’s head, cradling the animal in his arms. The dog howling into the rainy night. The young woman leaping from her car, screaming. And something happening in the next few moments that led to an introduction, dinner perhaps, then almost fifty years of marriage.

“I used to picture her in heaven,” Peg said. “Dog heaven, where God takes you for a walk every day and the angels feed you bones. But now that Harry’s gone, I’m not sure heaven works like that. I just can’t be at all sure.”

“It’s a nice thought, though,” I said.

The front door opened and Peg’s daughter came out onto the front porch.

“The crust is ready, Mom,” she said. “It’s time for you to come in.” She glared at me, taking my measure and determining, correctly, that I was just another in the parade of suitors who were trying to get the house. I wanted to call out that I’d done nothing to persuade her mother. I’d left nothing, said nothing, done nothing that could be construed as a manipulative bid. I hadn’t even told Peg Torrey my name.

Peg called her dogs, picked up her basket of lemons, nodded at me, and went inside. I turned to walk back down the street—and ran straight into the woman with the poodles. She was wielding a small statuette in her hand like a weapon.

“What Peg needs is this statue of Saint Joseph to smooth the sale of that house,” the woman said. “You want to put your Saint Joseph right at the base of the sign, head down, facing the house.”

While we were talking, a woman drove up in a minivan and parked. She opened the back door and lifted out a little lemon tree in a terra-cotta vase. It appeared to be quite heavy. She struggled to make her way up the walkway and left the tree on the front steps. There was a small white envelope poking through the branches like a flag.

“You see?” the woman with the poodles said, as if the gift of a tree were evidence of the power of Saint Joseph.

I excused myself and walked back to the car. While I was pulling away from the curb, I saw a white pickup truck pulling up to the house across the street from the bungalow. The bed was crammed with brooms and rakes, lawnmowers and leaf blowers. I drove by and peered into the driver’s side window. There was a brown-skinned man putting on a straw hat. I looked at his face, craning my neck to see if he had Lucy’s nose or her smile, and wondering where he lived, what his home was like and whether or not he was happy.

When I got in the car, I sat in the warm silence and tried to do what the energy healer had suggested.

“I forgive him,” I said out loud, “for loving me.”

The thing I thought about in response was a trip we took to Yellowstone National Park before Jackie was born. I had gone there as a child and remembered being marched into the Old Faithful Inn and made to stare up at the balconies that looked like a wooden layer cake, and to sit on the verandah and watch the geyser go off. But my parents were look-and-run vacationers; they never stopped and stayed, and I’d always wanted to stay in that grand old hotel. Rick planned the whole trip— rooms, reservations in the dining room, the whole deal.

When we got to the hotel, he led me through the lobby, running his hands along the wood railings, tracing all the angles and curves, explaining the beauty of mortise-and-tenon joinery. We sat in front of the enormous stone fireplace, drinking hot chocolate and staring up at the exposed rafters. The next day, we hiked past what must have been a hundred geysers and hot pots. We said each of their names out loud, read about the minerals that made them bloom orange and blue and waited patiently for each of them to erupt, if erupting was what they did. Once, a buffalo lumbered within a dozen feet of us, completely oblivious to our existence. It was a strange and beautiful place.

On the second night, Rick laid in wait for one of the card tables on the second floor of the inn—the ones with a view of Old Faithful itself. When one became vacant, he pounced on it, produced a deck of cards, and announced that this was where we would stay all evening. We played Go Fish and Crazy Eights until a group of people asked us when we expected to leave and Rick invited them for a game of Thirty-One. We played so late into the night that I finally went back to the room. At midnight, I poked my head out the door of our room to see him reading by the green mica lamp at one of the writing desks.

“I just love the lamp,” he confessed.

On the way home, in Jackson Hole, Rick bought a piece of raw birch from a man who was selling beautiful carved salad bowls from a cart near the town square. He told me he was going to carve me a bowl. It took him three years, several power tools and many cuts on his hands, but he finally presented me with a birch salad bowl, glistening with mineral oil. It was smooth and deceptively light, about an inch thick with whorls and knots dancing across the surface. I never use that bowl for lettuce. I keep it on a shelf in the living room, testimony to Rick’s calmness, patience and love.