The View from Here (11 page)

That first night, before the fire had died down to embers, I told her that I did not want to die in Aldenbrook Hospital, did not wish to take my last breaths against the backdrop of distant strangers coughing. She looked at me solidly and sought no clarification, but went ahead, sturdy little tugboat on a threatening sea, and led me through the bare, unadorned facts. Facts that I could make use of at some later date, when the time was right, at a time when she, as a medical professional, would be honor bound to extend life. She talked all the while in language so clean that you could almost forget that the words carried any anguish at all, and then when she was sure, from my understanding nod and sincere thank you, that the topic was done and would require no revisiting, she went on smoothly to talk about giddier plans. The kind people with terminal illnesses make all the time, for the future.

During the remainder of the week we laughed a great deal and amused ourselves by planning a holiday. A perfect holiday, for when I was well again. Phillip and I and Catherine and Dan had holidayed together before, once in a lovely house in Greece. We'd ridden bicycles everywhere on white dusty roads. Sonia had come on that holiday too, with her second husband Chris. No one had taken much to Chris—he was a vague presence and his marriage to Sonia was short-lived—but I remember other things about that fortnight.

It was the year all of us started complaining about our ages, while slightly reveling too in the notion of being forty, or over forty even. Trying it out. We indulged in a lot of talk, sort of mock complaint, about things that we no longer approved of or didn't like, things that younger people liked, delivering these gripes as jokes, tentative practice for the mild grumpiness we felt middle age owed us. The women had some more sincere grievances, though, centered on softening jawlines and thighs and upper arms; suddenly, frighteningly, we could see our mothers in them.

Now, of course, I am caught in a swift and inevitable acceleration of the aging process, and I wish that I could say that all my priorities have changed, but they have not completely. I care very much that Josee is not only younger than me, but also more beautiful.

• • •

“You passed on the invitation?”

“Yes. They'd love to come.”

Maria had almost jumped with pleasure, clasping her soft palms together in a gesture that had reminded me of Hudson. “Tomorrow?” she'd said, confirming. “Por la tarde?”

“Tomorrow evening. Yes,” I'd told her.

“Very good,” she answered, beaming. “Veeery good.”

“Thank you,” Sally said now.

I nodded, taking my seat for lunch.

“What will happen to these students of yours when you leave, Frankie?” Patsy asked. Her tone was light enough, but any mention of departure felt vaguely hostile to me. Departure implied a future that I didn't want to think about.

“I'm sure someone will come along,” I replied, deliberately matching the casualness of her expression. “There was an American woman teaching here before me. We took over most of her pupils.”

“You and…your boyfriend?”

I had unwittingly introduced a second unwelcome element into the conversation. “Yes,” I hurried on. “There never seems to be a long shortage of English teachers. People arrive and stay for a while—”

“Beats me,” Skipper interjected dreamily, “why they want to learn English anyway. Spanish is such a beautiful language.”

“Gets you a better class of cleaning job in California.” Bee Bee's smile lingered too long after her own joke.

Skipper, pulling herself up, turned so that she was facing Bee Bee. “Bee Bee,” she said in a voice that carried, “I am aware that you are a friend of Carl's wife, and that probably accounts for some of your hostility toward me, but I would just like to make it clear that I did not
steal
Carl from Marianne. His marriage was a formality, an unhappy one. He and I, on the other hand, are in love. So perhaps, even if you cannot find it in yourself to like me, you could put aside some of your enmity for the sake of your friendship with Carl. You could be happy for
him.”

Bee Bee's mouth hung slack. Her glass was arrested at chest height.

Carl, next to Skipper, put a gentle, proprietorial hand on her bare shoulder and said, softly, “She's right, Bee Bee. Marianne and I were…it was over. I love Skipper, and I wish you'd accept that.”

Bee Bee took a long sip of her drink and set it on the table. Then, reaching for her cigarettes, she gave her shoulders a constricted shrug. “Oh hell,” she said, tucking one of the cigarettes between her lips and narrowing her gaze against the flare of her lighter, “I guess I may as well. After all, what's a little adultery between friends?”

The faint sadness in Bee Bee's voice was dismissed by Patsy. “All the world loves a lover…” she clowned, “except the spouse.”

It might have been Skipper's little speech and Carl's reaction, but I think it was Mason too—his constant attentiveness, his ardor—that set me imagining the unimaginable. Imagining that the end of the vacation needn't necessarily entail a goodbye. That I could go to New York. Mason had an apartment there. He had told me so. An apartment with silk-covered walls the color of my eyes. The silk-covered walls had been Sally's idea; she'd hatched it with some crazy decorator she'd hired. Mason, he'd told me, laughing, had shelled out a fortune for them, and now Sally barely set foot in the place. She spent all her time in their house in Connecticut.

In the dead hour between lunch and cocktails, sunbathing in those gorgeous surroundings in the lazy afternoon heat, any distance I had felt from him as we were leaving my apartment that morning melted away. And I found myself thinking, why not? Why not picture myself there with him? Just the two of us and the silk-covered walls.

FIVE

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, the day that Arturo and Maria were to come for drinks, I had an early lesson with Letty. I woke easily, rearranged the pillows, skewed by some unconscious nocturnal tussle, and got up and walked to the window. I stood there, naked, looking down at the pool. On my skin clean white triangles marked out the shape of my bikini. “You'd be that color all over if you spent the winter in Connecticut,” Mason had teased.

“What's it like?” I'd asked. “Winter in Connecticut.” “Too frosty,” he'd replied, cupping one breast and pinching the rose nipple slightly so that it firmed and darkened, “for a creature with blood as warm as yours.”

Now he was swimming. I stepped forward, leaned my thighs against the sill and put one hand, tenderly, to the glass. I hoped he would pause and look up. If he had, I would have smiled, blown a kiss maybe, but he didn't. I watched him a few seconds longer, then shook my hair and went to take a shower.

I dressed with extra care in an embroidered dress he'd recently admired and, lowering my head to look in the dressing table mirror, added a slick of pastel lipstick. Patsy, I had noticed, always wore it, even at the beach, smoothing the stuff on with an unselfconscious index finger.

Ned caught us as we were leaving. Skimming the outdoor breakfast table he lifted a banana and tossed it from one hand to the other. “Sorry to be a third wheel,” he said, grinning, in a tone too friendly to carry meaning, “but I'm afraid it's a necessity.”

It was Lesley's birthday, he told us in the car. Bee Bee had opened half an eye, kicked his backside out of bed, and told him to get something organized. Then she'd gone back to sleep. He laughed. “Not that I'm complaining, you understand,” he said. “I took 'em on as a package deal.”

Ned loved Lesley—that was clear—and she loved him. But I thought about something then that Mason had told when we were whispering soft confidences into each other's hair. Ned had two sons of his own. In Canada. They lived with his ex-wife and her new husband, and Ned hardly ever saw them. It was a shame, I thought. Still, he had Bee Bee and Lesley now. Things had a way of working out.

“I wouldn't mind,” Ned was telling Mason, “only Bee Bee didn't remember until this morning. She claims the kid does it on purpose.” He winked over his seat back at me.

“Does what?” I asked, catching Mason's smile in the rearview mirror.

“Forgets to remind us.” I laughed.

Sitting across from Letty at the lace-covered table in her mother's kitchen I wondered how easy it would be to forget a child's birthday. A child to whom you had given birth. I could not imagine it. The birthdays of my own youth had been so orderly, cards displayed in neat lines of interlocking Vs on the mantelpiece. Lesley's growing up, though, was very different from what mine had been, I thought. And from Letty's too. Her brown eyes stared at me, expectant.

“When were you born?” I asked her, beginning the lesson. The answer involved a difficult construction, and she closed her eyes, mentally forming it.

Later I met Ned and Mason on the square.

“All done?”

They were laden with shopping.

Mason said, “We bought the town.”

“We let 'em keep the post office,” Ned said. Flecks of perspiration dampened his hairline as he piled parcels into the backseat. We laughed, looking at the heap; there was barely room for him beside them.

“Listen, I got a responsibility to the kid,” Ned said. “It's up to me to provide the kind of life to which she's gonna become accustomed.” Mason had told me that Lesley would inherit a steel fortune through her paternal grandfather when she turned twenty-one.

Now, opening the Buick's front door for me, he looked into my eyes and brushed my arm with a tenderness that resonated somewhere below the pit of my stomach. I was sorry about the lack of opportunity for a visit to my apartment, but there was something pleasant nonetheless about Ned's third-party presence. It seemed, in an odd way, to confirm us as a pair.

• • •

I have begun writing these recollections because they are so vivid, and it suddenly seems imperative, something I am unable to control. Recording them may impose some order, and perhaps, I hope, blunt them a little. I asked Catherine to buy the notebooks for me, three of them, which she did, unquestioningly, and it was during her stay and Phillip's absence that I first opened one and wrote down a little about Mexico and the Severances, with my own hand inscribing names that I have avoided summoning for many years.

In the writing and the precision it demands I am of course confronted with the parallels between the story that was then and the story that is mine now. It will seem strange, I suppose, that these had not already been obvious to me, but the surface characteristics of life can be very distracting. There I was young; now I am approaching middle age. There the sky was diamond-hard; here even on the hottest days it is tempered by haze. There I played lover, now my role is wife. There I propelled someone toward death, and now I am propelled toward my own.

So, by committing all this to paper I am willingly exposing it, to myself and possibly to others, because I do know that despite my conviction that writing is easier somehow, less inflammatory than affording the words oxygen, stories on pages, unless speedily reduced to ashes, have a far longer and more potent life than any given up to air and others' ears.

Phillip returned from his week in London more attentive and sadder than ever. Was this the proof that my hunch had been accurate, or did I simply impose a conclusion on the evidence? Was I seeing things, hearing things that were not there?

Two mornings after his return, I answered the telephone and silence responded, then, swiftly, a dial tone. I stood with the receiver to my ear listening to that dial tone for several seconds, imagining, on the other end of it, a young woman with her heart drumming in her chest. If Josee was in love with Phillip—and I was in no doubt that she was—how dismal these few months must have been for her. I knew.

I do not think these things have changed so much, despite the liberation women have won, or believe they have. They still hand over their phone numbers, don't they? And wait. They still tie their notions of the future up with men. Live half-lives often enough until a man comes along to fill in the gaps. Do men do that? I don't think so. I think men just keep moving onward, unidirectional, unless they are determinedly sidetracked. And Josee, too, is in that halfway generation, not mine—the last to accept that marriage, children could end a career—but not Chloe's either, which emphatically denies the possibility.

I guessed that Josee had a flat, a nice flat that she had bought with her own money, in a nice area not too far from her office, a flat with a spare bedroom for friends and for keeping the clothes that she wore least often in. I imagined that she had a smart, modern kitchen in which she rarely cooked. I guessed that she had expensive bottles of expensive-smelling things in her bathroom and on her bedside table and that she employed these things in preparing for my husband's visits. I decided that in the times between these visits, now, of necessity, very long times, she probably often sat on a smallish sofa and cried. Just as I had seen her cry that night in her car, as if she would never stop.

I wondered if she had confided in a well-meaning friend who talked her into going to the cinema sometimes, or to one of those wine places London is full of. I am surrounded by people who want to do that sort of thing for me.

Everybody has come, or been in touch. Anna, our neighbor from our first house, the one Phillip had before we were married, drives over often. Carly Bryant has visited too. We talked about our old days, our London days, living together those first two years after I arrived in England, talked about them with great humor and sentimentality, the lack of money, the dull men, the drab food all turning in the talk wildly entertaining. Carly's old boyfriend, Patrick, with whom I have kept up intermittently over the years, telephones often now, and when Tom comes to discuss business with Phillip, usually over lunch at the hotel in Dunstan, Alice arrives with him as often as not and stays here with me while they are gone.

And there are the stalwarts as well, of course, Helen, Chloe, more and more often Ed, Catherine and Dan and their children, Jack and Ben and Ness, my godchild, and Sonia and even her son Ollie, now an angry seventeen, here perhaps only in hopes of seeing Chloe, on whom he has had a lifelong crush, poor child, but here nevertheless.

All of them come, all of them full of love. The house is plump with it, and with the things love brings—kindness, patience, understanding. But what if they knew, these dear hearts? What if I told all, shone a spotlight on myself? And on Phillip? Would the fat, soft orb of goodwill disintegrate? I don't know. But I keep writing, understanding the risks.

• • •

They were not the kind of crowd who needed encouragement to turn a day, or any ordinary night, into an occasion. The week before there had been a funeral for a lizard. Howie had found the thing, claimed it was a scorpion, and chased the girls with it for a bit, before Jessica, suddenly feeling sorry for the creature, had realized it was dead and begun to cry. Skipper, comforting, had donated a small velvet box as a casket, and then we'd all joined a procession to the garden gate for the burial. Ned sang “When the Saints Go Marching In” and Patsy draped her head solemnly with a black silk half-slip.

Nighttime entertainment tended to take a more liquorfueled edge. Once Patsy and Bee Bee had clambered onto a glass-topped table and performed a double-act striptease. Today a birthday party, which Ned had christened The Hoopla, was to be held on the beach. Sally, who could set the house humming with the merest inflection of her perfectly tapered eyebrows, had already sent the garden men down there with blankets and umbrellas, and Christina and the maids were working on a cake.

“I want everybody dressed up. And we're having games,” Ned announced.

“Okay.” Skipper was an easy sell.

Carl, her ally in everything, grinned amiably. “Sure, great.” They were eating muffins on the patio.

“What shall
we
do?” Jenny asked.

“Bring elephants,” Ned replied.

The twins stared, then laughed, used to Ned now.

“All right. Forget the elephants,” he said. “There's not enough room in the car. Anyway, I have a better idea. But this is a real job. A serious job.” The twins nodded. “You up for it?” They nodded again. “Good, 'cause somebody has got to keep Lesley out of the way for an hour, and I think you're just the twosome to do it.”

They raced off to stand guard outside Lesley's bedroom in case, with some sudden alteration to the adolescent schedule she had adopted from Paige, she woke up before lunch.

It was a wonderful day. Not too hot and with just enough breeze. I remember thinking, seating myself near Mason on a bamboo beach mat, that this was happiness. That I knew it, right then. That I wouldn't need to look back from some distant future to realize it. I nestled on my elbows and filled up with sunshine as Skipper, a lipstick-cheeked rag doll in a pink dress of Jenny's, announced, “Here beginneth the official birthday celebration hoopla of Miss Lesley Patricia Mulholland Newson.” Ned and Lesley grinned at each other at the addition of his last name to hers. And then Skipper led the applause. As she clapped her hands above her head, the hem of her dress skimmed her upper thighs and fell open from a single fastening at the back of her neck, revealing the even trail of her spine and the rear triangle of her bikini.

“I saw this show, I think, Off Broadway,” Mason said. Patsy, pulling her T-shirt over her head, laughed with her face obscured.

“Bring on the dancing girls,” Bee Bee yelled, hands cupped to her mouth. Tallulah, startled, began to yip madly.

“It's great, isn't it, Dad?” Howie beamed as Ned, hoisting a cardboard megaphone, bellowed, calling for order.

Hudson, from his pastel bouncer under an umbrella, squealed, and Richard, smiling, put a soft arm around one son and lent an index finger to the other. “It's great,” he agreed.

“A Feat Of Great Daring Performed By A Person Standing On One Leg,” Skipper declared, “to be performed by…” Mason mimicked a drumroll as she pulled a paper slip from one of Bee Bee's floppy hats. “Richard,” she read.

There were cheers as Richard, loosing himself from his offspring, stood and scratched his head. “Would a feat of great daring standing on two hands do?” he asked.

Ned put it to a vote and pronounced that it would.

Richard flipped his weight forward and walked easily on his hands some ten feet along the beach.

“I married him for that,” Patsy said dryly.

Richard righted himself with a little jump, curving neatly in reverse. There were more cheers.

“That,” Patsy went on, “and the fact he could ski faster than me.” Mason smiled at her. “Whaddya know at twenty?” she said with a laugh.

Soon I was called upon as “A Person Singing A Short Song In Dramatic Fashion.” I sang “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” It was a party trick from my teen years. I enlisted the twins to shimmy beside me and toot imaginary bugles.

“Bravo,” Mason shouted when the three of us took our bows. “Moo-ore.” But by then it was lunchtime.

Christina had packed a picnic to match the festivities. In a box, an enormous white frosted cake was already festooned with candles. As Lesley shut her eyes to blow them out, Patsy said softly, “Wish for happiness, honey. Wish for it whenever you can.”

Patsy's tone was too poignant for the occasion, but the tiny puncture was overwhelmed by a more marked intrusion—the sound of an unfamiliar engine on the stony roadway at the top of the beach.

The car belonged to a pair of sandy-haired Americans named Beau and Myra. We struck up conversation with them after their swim. It was natural enough that we would; the beach was small, and we had claimed the center of it. They were taking a two-month driving tour around Mexico. It was the sort of thing they did quite often now that their kids were grown. Ned offered them a drink.