The Last Beach Bungalow (17 page)

“No, thank you,” I said. “This will be fine.”

Manon wrapped my things in pale pink tissue paper, sealed them with a silver sticker and tucked them into a shimmering silver bag. “Enjoy,” she said, and though I expected her to wink or smirk, she had only the most lovely smile.

When Jackie got home from the post-tournament pizza party, she went straight to her room to shower. I waited fifteen minutes after the water shut off before I went to check on her. The door was slightly ajar. I tapped on it, and pushed it open at the same time. Jackie was lying on her bed, her wet hair in a towel. She jerked her head up when she heard me. She was reading the
Town & Country
sex article. I could clearly see the sidebar on “Setting the Stage;” I recognized the photo and the type. She looked at me, but with an expression that was devoid of shame or embarrassment.

“Are you and Dad getting divorced?” she asked.

At other times, this question would have made me laugh. It would have seemed like the curious musings of a hypersensitive kid who has no room in her world for shades of gray. That day, however, I didn’t know how to respond.

“We’re fine,” I said, in a voice that even I wouldn’t have believed. “Remodeling is just, you know. . . . They say it’s one of the most stressful times in a marriage. It’s been hard, but we’re fine.”

She nodded then, and handed the sex article to me. I took a step forward, took it from her hand and folded it in half.

“Are you and Max thinking about sex?” I asked. I just blurted it. That was the only way I knew how to say something like that. There could be no deliberation, no planning.

“Mom!” she said, and wrinkled up her nose. “I’m not an idiot. I’m not about to just throw my life away at age fifteen because I like some guy!”

I wanted to tell her that sex wasn’t like that. It wasn’t that dangerous. I wanted to say that it was beautiful and enriching and that it could even be something close to sacred, but I didn’t trust my voice to get the message right, and mostly, I was relieved at her response, so I let it lie.

“It’s just my job to ask,” I said.

She rolled her eyes, then turned over, dismissing me.

T
UESDAY

When we woke up the next morning, I told Rick about the conversation with Jackie—about the article, and finding her reading it, what she had asked me and what I had asked her. I was focused wholly on the sex part of the scene, how awkward it had been, how scary and funny all at the same time. But just like Vanessa had, Rick leapt right over all that.

“She asked about divorce, huh?” he said. “She didn’t ask if we were having wild sex?”

I didn’t laugh. “That’s why I pulled out that article, actually.”

Rick raised his eyebrows, inviting me to say more.

“It was a how-to article. How to make it a priority. And how to think of it as a celebration of being alive.”

Rick stepped toward me.

“I’m going to work on it,” I said.

He took both my hands in his. He kissed first one and then another. “Let me know if you need any help practicing.”

When Jackie left for school, I snuck back to her computer. Max had mailed her the lyrics to songs about longing and lust. He had mailed her greeting cards about not being able to bear being apart. In one e-mail, he asked her to wear the blue fuzzy sweater again because it made her eyes look amazing and because it was so soft to touch. “I love you in that sweater,” he wrote.

I tried to go about my day, but I couldn’t remember the last time Rick had told me I looked good in anything. I kept thinking about a T-shirt he used to have—an old soft green one. He often wore it when he came back from surfing in the morning, and the sight of him walking in the door with wet hair would make me swoon.

Around 2:00, I called Avisha.

“Bonjour,” Manon said.

“This is April Newton,” I said. “You sold me the brown bra and panties yesterday? I’d like to buy the brown dress.”

I called Rick next and asked if he would pick something up for me on the way home. I gave him the address and said, “Just ask for Manon.”

I don’t know what time of day Rick drove down to the Village, but I could imagine the whole thing. He would have parked his truck on the street, stood in his work boots on the sidewalk and looked back and forth from the piece of paper to the lingerie store. Gallantly, he would have stepped inside that garden of silk. He would have stood in the shadows of negligees and night-gowns, amid the whisper of lacy brassieres and thongs, and his throat would have gone dry.

“I’m here to pick up something for my wife,” he would have croaked.

And Manon would have swept across the store, bringing the slip of chocolate brown and the promise that his wife was, indeed, ready for a celebration.

When Rick came home, I met him at the door and welcomed him home with a kiss. He didn’t stop to ask me what was going on, he just dropped the bag from the lingerie store and kissed me back.

“Jackie’s gone,” I said, after a while. He took me by the hand, led me up the stairs and started taking off my clothes. The beautiful brown bra and panties were in the closet and the brown dress was in the silver bag in the doorway. I was wearing ratty old white cotton underwear and my gray stretched-out bra. But Rick hardly noticed. The light in that bedroom was clear, with a bluish cast from all that sky and sea. He traced his fingers on my face and on my belly and along all my scars. I just stood there, trying to feel his touch, trying to really feel it, and what I felt was electric. I remembered the
Town & Country
article and all the talk about being present and honoring each other’s bodies as sacred, so wherever Rick touched me, I touched him back. Ear, ear, heart, heart. After awhile, he caught on to what I was doing and began to touch me in places that harbored even more heat. It was magic, because we were both giving and receiving all at the same time.

“I want to throw you down on this bed and ravage you,” he finally said.

I smiled and whispered in his ear, “I wish you would.”

It was over rather quickly. It had, after all, been a while. I lay there, suddenly, with tears running down my cheeks.

“Are you OK?” Rick asked.

“Just happy,” I said.

F
RIDAY

Three days later, I unfolded the
Beach Reporter
and saw this headline:

Local Family Wins Right to Buy Beach Bungalow

The family, it turned out, had written Peg a letter from the point of view of their dog. This letter had been folded up and slipped between the pages of a children’s book called
The Little House.
I knew that book. Jackie had loved it. It was a story about a country cottage that slowly becomes swallowed up by the city. Into its green, open meadow comes a road, then cars, soon a train and skyscrapers. In the end, someone lifts the cottage onto a truck and hauls it back out to the country to start a new life away from the noise and the rush of the city—just like the house I had seen when I was thirteen years old, traveling north to the Boundary Waters. Farther down in the newspaper article, Peg was quoted as saying that there were a great many stories that had tempted her, but that the combination of the dog’s story and the picture book had swayed her. “I’ve never sold a house before,” she said, “and I enjoyed the process enormously. I will leave here knowing that the house I lived in all these years will be in good, loving hands.” She would be moving in two months’ time, the article concluded, to a retirement home near her daughter in Berkeley.

I folded up the newspaper and made a note to myself to call the movers to come set my piano upright on its legs.

I never bought the enormous pen and ink drawing of a tree that I saw in Portland, Oregon, when I was twenty-three, but I feel as if I’ve lived with that piece of art my entire life. I can close my eyes and see the whole picture—the subtle shading, the surprising scale, the whiteness of the white where it peeks out from underneath each leaf. I love that painting. The same is true of the bungalow. It’s not mine. I spent a grand total of about half an hour in it, but I love it all the same. I love that there exists a house with red walls and old wood floors and a fireplace made of Catalina tile, where a woman who loved her husband and her dogs once lived. In the weeks after the house was sold, I would sometimes drive down Pepper Tree Lane just to look at it again and re-assure myself that it was there.

T
UESDAY

In the last week of January, on a day that was cloudless and crystal clear, I drove down to Starbucks in Redondo Village. I love the smell of coffee, the whole idea of it— the hot cup in your hand, the cheerful way you buzz through the day after you’ve enjoyed it—but I can’t drink it; it keeps me awake at night. And I’m an infinitely better human being when I sleep well, so I try to avoid coffee. On that day, however, I was doing revisions on the Chuck Williams piece, and at the same time I was trying to finish a draft for an article about a couple who had designed all the fabric for California Pizza Kitchen restaurants. I needed help to get through the day.

I was standing in line at the counter trying to make sense of the vast number of choices before me, when I heard Peg Torrey place an order. I looked up and saw her standing there, a few places ahead of me.

“I tried to get your house,” I said.

She smiled, and it was then I realized that she probably heard that statement several times a day. “What was your reason?” she asked. “It turns out there are only a handful, really, or at least only a handful people confess to.”

“The house my husband and I were building was haunted.”

Peg looked at as if she could see straight through me. “I haven’t heard that one,” she said. “You had a ghost?”

“Sort of. We had fear, we had tension. We had our own mortality. They rub off on a house, I think. They stay in the wood and seep through the floors.”

Peg looked at me in a way that made me nervous. “That’s exactly what I felt about my bungalow, only it was love and joy and the goodness of my husband that seeped through. He was a very good man.”

“It sounds like it,” I said. “I heard you talk about him on TV.”

She smiled again, paid for her coffee, and went outside to sit in the sun. It took me forever to get my cappuccino but when I walked outside, Peg was still sitting in the sun, like a cat at rest.

I smiled at her.

“I was wondering,” she said. “What you did with the haunted house.”

“We’re living in it,” I said, “keeping the ghosts at bay. Your house changed everything for us.”

“You sent your husband’s letters,” Peg said.

I wasn’t, somehow, surprised by this revelation—that Peg Torrey had read what I had delivered on Christmas Day. “That’s right,” I said.

“I kept those letters in a shoebox on my bedside table,” Peg explained. “I put all my favorites in there.”

“I loved your house,” I said, “and I loved that you held the contest. I’m glad it turned out so well for you.” I hesitated, then turned to leave, as if the conversation were over.

“Would you like to come by?” Peg asked.

It took me a moment to process what she was asking. “Right now?” I asked.

She nodded, waving her hand over her little wrought iron table and the empty coffee cup. “I was just about to walk home. I’d love the company.”

I accompanied Peg back to her house on foot. It was about a ten-minute walk along the water, then the half block in. To this day, I don’t remember taking that walk. I don’t remember if we stopped at the stop signs, if the birds were singing or the waves were pounding. One minute, I was going to Starbucks because I could barely keep my eyes open, and the next minute, I was standing at the door of Peg Torrey’s house as she fumbled for her key.

She led me into the dining room, where boxes were stacked along the walls and behind the long side of the big pine table. I turned and pointed toward the mantel, which was swept clean of all its decorations. “You had two mice bookends,” I said, remembering. “My grandmother used to have the same set. I loved to play with them. One year when I went to visit, my grandma had a copy of
My Antonia
propped up by the mice. I was too old to pretend the mice could talk and eat bits of cheese, but I still wanted them near me so I put them on the coffee table while I read Willa Cather.”

Peg threw her head back and laughed. I could see her teeth, worn down on the tops, yellow, filled with silver. “Did your grandmother have the pig?” she asked.

“No pigs,” I said.

“Come this way,” Peg said, and just like with Manon at the lingerie store when she asked me to try on the chocolate-colored bra, I felt powerless not to follow. We walked down the hallway where the mounted board games had hung, and into the master bedroom. This was a place I hadn’t seen during the open house. It wasn’t a big room, but the walls were painted New Mexican turquoise, which made it seem like a little jewel. All the furniture in the room was a rich, dark brown, except for a chair in the corner upholstered in a wild, bright chintz, with dark brown piping.

Peg closed the door behind us, and I felt my heart begin to beat faster, as if there were some kind of danger at hand. She pointed, and there, behind the door, was a little brass pig sitting on a doorstop, with his snout pushed out and his tail curled up behind him. His ears sprung out from his head just like the ears on the mice.

“I found the pig first,” Peg explained, “at a bookstore in Aspen, Colorado. This was only about ten years ago. Harry was there for a medical conference. I was so taken with the pig, that I had to bring him home. Harry gave me the mice the next year for Christmas, though he never told me where they came from. It was one of the nicest presents he ever gave me.” I could see in her smile the years of gifts she and her husband must have exchanged—years and years of getting it right and getting it wrong and every so often getting it so precisely that the gift in question made the other person’s soul sing.