The View from Here (17 page)

There were musicians, cloistered in the shadows beyond the base of the dirt cliff path. I watched as Sally, barefoot, pulled her husband to dance. I sat a good way back from the revealing flare of the firelight, and took a glass gratefully from someone and drank, wanting to be dulled against the events and pace of a day that I could no longer keep up with.

I kept drinking until I was tipsy and my legs, dancing hopelessly later with Richard, felt numb.

“Sorry, Frankie,” he said, goofily cheerful, standing on my foot.

I nodded, attempting to smile forgiveness. The music wasn't really dancing music anyway. Guitars playing marshmallow love songs. None of us would have danced at all if Sally hadn't started it, I thought. I gripped Richard's hand too tightly in mine, worried suddenly about the possibility of being knocked over by his heavy shuffle. In my head Paige's words,
Daddy screwed someone else
, continued to repeat.

I had not considered the possibility that Mason might have had other affairs. At twenty-two I'd had so little experience of marriage. My parents and their friends were my models for it. Of course I realized that married people could be unfaithful, but those that were, it seemed to me then, separated and got divorced. The kind of marriage that accepts infidelities, adds them, like so many bricks, to the fortress that shields the pair within, was alien to me. But then, when the music stopped, and the sound of the sea interceded, and Richard stood back and grinned, it struck me suddenly that if Mason had had other affairs—Paige was just a child after all, and prone to showing off—but if he had, wasn't that just another indication that his marriage was unhappy? I wanted that night, more than any other night, to believe wholeheartedly that his marriage was unhappy.

The children were heavily asleep by the time we got back, draped over shoulders like so many sandy rag dolls. At the house Mason and I carried the twins to their room. They woke when he switched on the light and they stared at us blearily. We undressed them and slid them into their beds, dragging the sheets up to their chins.

“We didn't brush our teeth,” Jessica said, croakily, over hers.

“If they fall out in the night, I'll buy you some new ones,” Mason whispered.

Jessica, drifting again already, giggled softly into her pillow.

In the hallway, he turned to me and said, without preamble, “It's married people's stuff, not like us.”

I stared, dumb from drink and tiredness, exhausted by the spiking effort of loving him, the impossibility of the circumstances. Fighting the realization that I had let my whole life, in that pastless, futureless, rose-tinted bell jar, become him. A man I hardly knew, someone else's husband, who was putting his hands on my shoulders now and talking to me about spending the afternoon in bed with his wife.

“Not like us,” he repeated.

I nodded slowly.

“We'll get away for a bit tomorrow,” he promised.

Sometimes there's no going back, and anyway, what did I have to go back to? The next day in my apartment, that had, shut up between visits, begun to smell of us, of love, I thought, he lifted his lips from mine and said my name. Just as I had imagined he would all through Maria's lesson, all through the constant firing of her fascinated inquiry about the Severances, and the Lukes, and the Newsons, but particularly about Sally. Where did she buy her clothes? What foods did she serve most often? How many maids did she employ all together?

I smiled now and simply kissed him back, a girl in love with a man who loved her, and I thought, as I often had, that the other lovers I had known paled next to him. Then, confident in the grip of this happy moment, I leaned into his neck and said, “Have you done this before?”

Mason tipped my head back to look at my face, but he made no attempt to avoid the question. That was one of the things I admired about him; even at times when I didn't particularly welcome it, he was candid with me.

“Sally and I have had our problems,” he answered thoughtfully, his gaze moving, fixing on some distant space above my head. He raised my chin and looked at me and said, “But with you it's special.”

I saw myself, in the moment before he bent to kiss me again, reflected in his eyes.

My face must still have been gleaming with love when Mason said casually to his wife, “Look. Pineapples.” He had bought them when I was with Maria. “The ingredient that will force Mr. Newson to concede on the best rum punch recipe.”

Sally, answering with a noncommittal hum, looked at me steadily over her sunglasses, her book, her golden knees. Next to her Bee Bee seemed to stare too. I didn't care. I didn't care about anything. I was just glad that the mood of capricious flirtatiousness that had marked Sally's behavior the day before seemed to have dimmed.

It was Patsy who suggested we go back to La Roseleda. She felt like dancing, she said to me later, out by the pool, and reminded me what a lot of fun we'd had that first night, my first night, when we'd gone there. She smiled that gorgeous smile of hers directly at me. “Do you want to go?” she asked, as if it was somehow my decision. As if I was central to her plans.

Since her confession to me, that morning after the row, she'd treated me like that quite often, like a special pal. Like the sort of inseparable sidekick girls have at school. Patsy was the sort of girl I'd wanted to be at school, pretty, and petulant, and popular. She jumped up and swiveled her hips a little and announced her desire to go dancing to the spread of sunbathers. Richard got up and threw one arm around her shoulders and swung his hip awkwardly to bump hers.

“God, I hope it's not contagious,” Bee Bee said, as the movement knocked them both off balance. The recovery was jerky.

Richard, though, continued good-spiritedly, “Just warming up my samba, Bee Bee.” He jived toward her a little, with prematurely middle-aged knees.

“Well, you don't seem to be lighting any fires,” she retorted, backing up from his advance. “Still,” she went on, lowering herself into a tapestry-covered chair, “that's not your fault, darlin'. You gotta rub
two
sticks together to get a spark.”

Bee Bee laughed and so did Sally. Patsy did not.

Richard, uncomprehending, grinned, snapped his fingers jauntily, and opened his mouth to speak, but Patsy stopped him: “Shut up.”

Sally, still smiling, looked up from the intense business of fastening the clasp of a fat silver bracelet.

“What's all the hilarity in aid of?” Ned asked from the door.

“I was just—” Richard began.

“Stop!” Patsy commanded. Richard turned to her. “You're letting them make a fool out of you,” she said, “fools out of both of us.”

Behind Ned, Mason stood watching. Patsy squeezed her eyes closed for a second and seemed to forcibly control herself. She sighed. “Look…sorry…Just forget it.” She raised a palm, then smiled a small apologetic smile.

“I always get cranky when I'm inappropriately dressed,” she said. She still had on her white tennis outfit, an intricate affair of sewn-together daisies. She and Ned had played before lunch. She turned and walked off, ostensibly to change.

Richard, meek, followed her.

“Terribly highly strung,” Sally commented dryly to Bee Bee.

“Distinct touch of the Scarletts,” Bee Bee agreed.

I turned away, uncomfortable with the subtlety of their mockery and, worse, the hint of truth in it. Patsy could be hysterical. But I thought of her as a friend. And, recently, more than that, an ally.

Ned applauded that night, in the square, beneath the twinkling night-lights, when Sally parked the Chevrolet. “Hats off to Mrs. Severance,” he said as the stately tail of the staff's big sedan slipped easily between the Buick and the jeep. Sally had volunteered to drive so that we could take three cars.

“The thing's a tank to handle,” Ned had warned.

“But we won't have to cram,” she had said. “I hate to cram.”

“Never underestimate Mrs. Severance,” Bee Bee told us now with a wry look.

“Any friend of yours, my dear…” Ned grinned, taking her arm for the short walk.

The hinged windows at La Roseleda were angled open toward the sea and a light breeze blew the cigarette smoke generated by two men at the bar toward the barman who was wiping glasses behind it. It was quiet. The musicians, playing rather listlessly for a lone couple on the dance floor, perked up a little at our entrance and the beat brightened as we took our table. When Patsy, standing, shrugged off her knee-length jacket, baring her back to a point below her waist, one of the men at the bar whistled and we all laughed. Then, seated, we fell momentarily silent, the atmosphere between us suddenly flat and a little self-conscious.

“Hell, I've seen wakes more lively,” Ned challenged.

Richard, spurred, got up and invited Patsy to dance. As she stood, he held her chair and watched her with the expression of a boy who has caught a butterfly in a jar.

“Frankie?” Mason asked as they moved off.

I was surprised and pleased at his boldness. In his arms, my chin at his shoulder, I remembered something. Myself. However many hours, or days, or weeks ago it was, dancing with him here before. What was it that had changed so? Everything. I shut my eyes for a minute and pretended we were alone.

“Hello.” Patsy turned, her arms open to us, and peeled off with Mason.

Richard flashed his eyebrows. “Take me on, Frankie?” he said, leaning toward my ear.

“Sure,” I answered, disarmed, as he placed one hand carefully on my waist and extended the other, cautiously crooked, for me to hold.

I got to dance with Mason again later. The table shuffled, once, twice. Everybody danced with everybody. I flirted with all the men, even the waiter, in the way that a woman who is crazy in love with one man does.

“Do you think you'll buy the house?” I asked alone with him at the table. Richard had escorted Sally to the dance floor, Ned was dancing with Patsy, and in his absence Bee Bee had wandered to the bar. She was propped there now, happily absorbed with the barman, smoking a slow cigarette.

Mason shook his head over the noise. A lively group of young people had come in. “No.”

I smiled at him. What did I care? In the bright new future his love promised, a lot of things would be wonderfully unimportant.

Ned said maybe we ought to make tracks. Bee Bee, heading vaguely for the ladies' room, had lost her bearings and ended up in the street. Ned had had to bolt down the narrow staircase to fetch her.

“I'd be happy to,” Sally replied. She gave her chair a short, rigid push backward. “Perhaps someone could alert Fred and Ginger.”

Richard, who was as drunk that night as Bee Bee, got up messily and padded to the dance floor. At the edge of it he lifted his thumb and indicated the door. I watched as his wife, noticing him, turned her face from Mason's shirt front. Her expression tightened angrily.

Ned slid Bee Bee into the Buick's backseat, behind Mason and me, but she just grinned and kept on sliding and hauled herself out the door on the other side. She tottered toward the Chevrolet. Sally had got in to drive it.

“She's all on her lonesome,” Bee Bee called back, her voice loud in the quiet street.

There was a slam, then the purr of an engine, and Sally pulled out. I saw Patsy put the jeep into gear as Richard, in the passenger seat, gave his head a little shake, fighting sleep. Ned's presence prevented Mason from reaching for my hand as we moved off, but I was glad, anyway, to be sitting beside him. We exchanged a smile. In the back Ned was humming.

Just past the turnoff to my apartment some men were smoking together under a streetlamp. One of them turned as we passed and looked at me and touched his hand to his head. Dizzy from the lovely day and the dancing, and Mason's proximity, I waved childishly, fluttering my fingers, and then I shut my eyes for a while.

That was all I could remember later. The men. The wave. Ned's leisurely hum behind me. Then the crack, the slap of Mason's arm across my ribcage as I hurtled forward toward the dashboard.

I screamed, shocked, involuntary air forcing my voice, but by the time I had lurched back against my seat, I was aware that I had heard the violent exploding sound of buckling metal. It wasn't us. We hadn't hit anything, though the jeep's taillights loomed directly in front of us.

“What the…” Ned had been jerked forward off his seat.

I flicked my head toward Mason, who had already flung his door open. He sprang and was gone. Ned and I, slower, dazed, watched stunned for a moment in the faint flicker of the interior light. Then we were out too. Running behind Mason through the chaotic, crisscrossing beams of headlights.

We were near the trash dump. People were coming out of the little houses, shouting. I recognized among them the little boy that Jessica had waved to, sleepy in an undershirt and cotton Y-front briefs. But I kept running, like everyone else, toward Sally's car and the sound we'd heard. And something else—the plaintive echo of a locked car horn.

Richard tugged the Chevrolet's passenger door open and began pulling Bee Bee out, his solid torso bending to her frail one. She emerged, papery, his solid grip on her upper arms, one of her hands faltering slackly ahead of her. Patsy, on the other side, was leaning in, talking to Sally, asking her something. Mason, reaching them, grabbed Patsy's waist and flung her so forcefully out of the way that she stumbled.

“Sally,” he shouted. “Sally?”

The car was at a forty-five-degree angle to the road, the long hood jammed against a thick wooden post. Sally's head was on the steering wheel, and one arm, bent at the elbow, was pinned between the wheel and her chest.

“Darling?” Mason squatted at the open door beside her, and Sally slowly raised her head. She lifted one hand, tentatively, as if it did not belong to her, and pushed her hair back from her face.

“Something ran out,” she said, quietly.